Uganda Catholic Bishop Odama Says Abortion Robs the World of Geniuses
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by Steven Ertelt
LifeNews.com Editor
May 27, 2008
Kampala, Uganada (LifeNews.com) — Speaking out against efforts by some leaders of African nations to legalize abortion, Archbishop John Baptist Odama of Gulu diocese said abortion robs the world of talented people. He said the practice shows a significant disrespect of life and should be stopped.
Archbishop Odama said abortion has resulted in the intentional killing of geniuses who could have made the world a better place with their talents and abilities.
“If they had been allowed to live, by now they could have got the medicines for the diseases that have no cure a yet," he said, according to a New Vision report.
“If we cannot hesitate to kill even children in wombs, what will stop us from killing grown-ups who annoy us?” Odama asked.
Last June, representatives of Uganda attended a conference with leaders of several other countries who said their countries should allow abortions. They said abortions should be allowed because of claims of thousands of women dying from illegal abortions.
However, Vice President Gilbert Bukenya, said last August that he doesn’t support the legalization of abortion there.
Bukenya spoke at a Catholic church in the in Masaka District and said abortion contradicts the values of the African people. He spoke as leader of the Ngabi clan and discussed the unwritten laws that the people of Uganda have followed for centuries.
"The practice might be legal in some western countries, but we cannot adopt it here because our cultural norms are different," Professor Bukenya said.
"As a member of Parliament, I will definitely oppose any proposal to adopt such abnormal and immoral practices," he added.
Calls from other leaders to allow abortion appear to ignore evidence in industrialized nations that access to better health care, not abortion, reduces maternal mortality.
Dr. Randy O’Bannon, Education Director for National Right to Life, has said that the number of illegal abortions in developing countries is likely inflated.
According to the United Nations World Health Organization, 68,000 women die annually due to unsafe abortions.
"The precision implied in such numbers is highly misleading," O’Bannon says. He adds that such figures "are based on meager data and a lot of assumption-laden extrapolations."
Many of these countries do not maintain detailed birth or mortality records, much less abortion statistics, making even the roughest of estimates problematic," he explained.
WHO also relies on what is calls "public source data" to provide illegal abortion death guesses. Typically, a "public source" is a journal article, report, or unpublished document, often from a pro-abortion organization, raising questions about its objectivity.
O’Bannon says these sources of information are unreliable.
