Russian bishop blasts child euthanasia, abortions

Natalya Mihailova | 23 January 2015
Moscow, January 22, Interfax - The foreign relations chief of the Russian Orthodox Church has attacked the practice of euthanasia in various countries and condemned abortions.

“The legalization of voluntary passing away, so-called euthanasia, including that of under-age children, is one more ominous result of the perverse interpretation of human rights,” Metropolitan Hilarion of Volokolamsk, the Chairman of the Synodal Department for External Church Relations, said during a meeting at the State Duma on Thursday.

Countries that allow child euthanasia assume that thereby the follow “principles of humanism” but a child cannot make responsible decisions, he argued.

Secular ideology becomes a dominant power that does not tolerate any dissent and “enables well-organized minority groups to successfully force their will on the majority,” he said. “In essence, human rights have become a means of manipulating the majority, and defense of human rights transforms into a dictatorship of a minority over the majority.”

Metropolitan Hilarion also attacked purported justification of abortions as “the exercise of the inseparable right of a woman to control her body.”

“Denial of the personality status of the fetus is the fundamental principle of abortion advocates,” he said.

The head of the Duma Committee for Family, Woman and Child Problems, Yelena Mizulina, slammed the increasingly wide use of drug-induced abortions.

Drugs commonly dubbed “baby kaput” are “a poison that is dangerous to a woman’s health and threatens it with infertility,” she claimed, insisting on limiting trade in such remedies and on making them available solely to state medical institutions.

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