ARCHBISHOP of Kingston Lawrence Burke has made a direct appeal to Prime Minister Portia Simpson Miller and Opposition Leader Bruce Golding to ‘defend life’ in the upcoming debates to review legislation governing abortion and capital punishment.

The Roman Catholic Archbishop on Saturday urged the prime minister, who was in attendance at a mass celebrating his 25th anniversary of Episcopal Ordination at the Holy Trinity Cathedral in Kingston, to join him in taking a hard line position against the pro-legalisation abortion agenda.

He also told former JLP Senator Oswald Harding, who represented Golding at the function, to convey a similar message to the party leader.

“Madame prime minister and Dr Harding, representing the leader of the Opposition, I don’t have the opportunity to talk to you very often and I won’t give you a long homily but there are a couple of things that are coming up soon in the House,” the archbishop began.

“One is the move that is being suggested by people of goodwill, who would like to liberalise the law of abortion; defend life, defend life,” he stated to thunderous applause.

According to Burke, to do any less than this, was to make a mockery of the country’s stance on human rights.

“We are people who say that we are for human rights. The basic right we have is the right to life, and we should not snuff it out. None of us would be here to use the gifts that we have to build this country if our parents had decided…I can’t afford this baby and had an abortion,” he added.

In recent times, Burke has decried attempts to legalise abortion in Jamaica, calling instead for abortionists to be ferreted out and prosecuted.

Current laws threaten imprison-ment for both the patient and the person performing the abortion. Abortions are illegal in Jamaica and can only be done under circumstances where the pregnancy threatens the life or health of the mother.

The Roman Catholic Church, which rejects the use of contraception for birth control, is staunchly pro-life, and holds, as does the Christian teachings, that life begins at conception and that to abort is to take a human life.

But faced with a reality of 16 per cent mortality deaths among adolescents who had botched abortions, former Health Minister John Junor late last year announced that legislation was under review to, among other things, reduce the number of back room abortions, which represented a third of the maternal deaths in 2004. The review committee is headed by Dr Wynante Patterson.

The Medical Association of Jamaica (MAJ), the island’s grouping of doctors and surgeons, supports the clarification and review of the regulations, claiming that it would reduce unwanted pregnancies as well as the island’s maternal mortality rate. But the Catholic community and other religious bodies are not in agreement.

Meanwhile, on the issue of capital punishment the Archbishop said while there was widespread support for this type of punishment it was still the wrong approach.

“Obviously it looks like the easy way and we know that the majority of people – even Catholics -would support capital punishment but we don’t believe that it is right to reduce violence by using state violence,” he noted.

“We don’t believe it is right to reduce murder by legalising murder, even of those who have taken the lives of others. I speak as a person of faith and I know there are people who don’t share our position and they are people of goodwill, they are not people who are trying to make trouble but, at the same time we, believe in the right to life from the moment of conception until God takes us,” the Archbishop added.