José Sobrinho, a Catholic archbishop, said that the girl's mother and the doctors who performed the abortion had been automatically excommunicated under canon law.
In response, the National Conference of Bishops of Brazil declared that no one was excommunicated in the case, and in an article published in L'Osservatore Romano, a bioethicist of the Holy See rebuked the archbishop for his public statement.
Abortion is legal under Brazilian law in cases of pregnancies resulting from rape or in which giving birth would endanger the mother's life.
According to Fatima Maia, the director of the hospital CISAM, if the pregnancy continued, the child could suffer a ruptured uterus and hemorrhage, and she also ran the risk of diabetes, hypertension, eclampsia and lifelong sterility.
[17][18] At the press conference, journalists received a document on excommunication written by canonist Enrique Pérez Pujol, who stressed that the penalty should not be applied amid a polemic.
[17] Archbishop Geraldo Lyrio Rocha, president of the conference, avoided answering a question whether Sobrinho had acted hastily in saying that automatic excommunication had occurred.
[17][18] The Holy See's unofficial newspaper, L'Osservatore Romano, published a front page article on 15 March 2009 by Rino Fisichella, President of the Pontifical Academy for Life, that was highly critical of Sobrinho's action.
[19] Fisichella said that excommunication was automatic, so that focusing on it rather than on helping and supporting the child victim showed a lack of compassion that detracted from the credibility of the Church's anti-abortion teaching.
[20][21] After reiterating the Church's condemnation of abortion, he wrote that the moral situation was difficult because of the girl's young age and the risk to her life and praised those who "allowed [her] to live and will help [her] to recover hope and trust".
[20][23] The members of the Academy gave Fisichella a vote of no confidence because of his article, and he was reassigned in the next year to the Pontifical Council for Promoting the New Evangelization.
[25] Giovanni Battista Re, Prefect of the Congregation for Bishops and President of the Pontifical Commission for Latin America, deplored what he called an attack on the Church in Brazil: "It is a sad case, but the real problem is that the twins conceived were two innocent persons, who had the right to live and could not be eliminated.
Another of the doctors involved said that he will continue attending Mass, "praying, conversing with God, and asking him to illuminate me and my colleagues in our medical team to help us take care of people in similar cases".