This Monday the Constitutional Court decriminalized the crime of abortion in Colombia until week 24. Two days have passed since the decision was made and the positions, for or against, are many. Regarding the case of health workers, it is specified that conscientious objection can be invoked something that for the president of the Medical College of Antioquia is the only option he has to not affect his professional ethics.
Carlos Valdivieso was in an interview with the Blu Radio station, in which he gave his firm position: he will not perform any abortion. For the specialist, the study of medicine should not accept the intervention: “We doctors have not studied medicine to serve as executioners. You have to see the doctor’s point of view. Doctors do not study to perform this type of procedure and absolute respect for conscientious objection is required”, the surgeon maintained.
However, despite his position, the health professional explained the surgical process that is performed on a person who aborts. Together, he revealed the difference between intervening in a pregnancy with a few weeks of development and another with a progressive state.
“If there is a minor pregnancy, with a low level of weeks, the gynecologist will have to use a curette and perform a procedure where the product of the pregnancy is extracted, which is a living being that will end its life at that moment,” says Valdivelso, while, on the other hand, he says that If the interruption of pregnancy has a period of 20 or more weeks, resistant drugs should be used.
“They will have to supply a drug that allows a heart attack in that fetus and then get rid of the mother, which is the term used, extract that fetus that was previously alive,” explains the doctor, in dialogue with Blue Radio.
For the main head of the Medical College of Antioquia, his hopes that the Constitutional Court will change the considerations taken in connection with the weeks of pregnancy to carry out an abortion are few. Justly, The man called on his colleagues to desist from performing the surgical procedure and persist with conscientious objection.
“The only way out for doctors is to object individually and that is a very important issue that must be taken into account. We doctors know that life exists from the moment of conception, no one can stop to deny it”, argued, by way of conclusion, surgeon Carlos Valdivieso.
In addition, under this same ideological slope is the Catholic Church, in a statement from the Colombian Episcopal Conference, all the Catholic bishops of the country spoke out on the issue and asked citizens to resort to creative solidarity in favor of life.
“The Catholic bishops of Colombia express our perplexity and deep pain at the press release of the Constitutional Court of February 21 on the ‘conduct of abortion will only be punishable when it is performed after the twenty-fourth (24) week of gestation and, in any case, this time limit will not apply to the three cases established in Judgment C-355 of 2006′″, says the statement.
The religious group considers that the interruption of a pregnancy is “immoral and violent”.
“Direct abortion is an immoral act and a violent practice contrary to life. Faced with the path opened by the Court, we then wonder if there were not other paths that would allow the life of mothers to be safeguarded together with that of their unborn children. The problem of abortion cannot be limited only to pregnant women, but demands the solidarity of the entire society”communicates the Colombian Episcopal Conference.