Remember being 9 with your Easy-Bake Oven (Mommy/MDs excommunicated)?

Allison Hantschell writes:

I had an Easy-Bake Oven, when I was 9. It made tiny cupcakes and itty-bitty cookies, and I haven’t been able to stop thinking about it since I read about the girl in Brazil.

I don’t know her name, but she’s 9 years old, living in Brazil. Brutally raped by her stepfather, multiple times over a period of years, and finally impregnated with twins.

Nine years old. And instead of playing baseball, or learning numbers, or baking tiny cupcakes and itty-bitty cookies, this little girl is at the center of a worldwide controversy over the Roman Catholic Church, its views on abortion, and, above all, the role of mercy and the incoherence of men.

Raped by a parent until precocious adolescence led to pregnancy, and the church at last took action . . . .

Updates

Brazil’s Archbishop Emeritus Jose Cardoso Sobrinho takes anti-abortion political stance and church officials argue that the abortion was not a medical necessity.

02/24/2010 – Archbishop Fisichella Stands His Ground:

Five members of the 145-member Pontifical Academy for Life, which Fisichella heads, circulated a letter calling for his resignation. And he isn’t going to resign, apologize or lend further ink to his critics. Why <a href="“>the uproar?

Archbishop Fisichella’s alleged sin was to write in the Vatican newspaper, L’Osservatore Romano, that the public declaration of the already automatic excommunications [in Brazil] was “hasty” and the nine-year-old girl, whose life was saved by the abortion of twins she was physically unequipped to have, “should have been above all defended, embraced, treated with sweetness to make her feel that we were all on her side, all of us, without distinction.”