The excommunications for those involved in the nine-year-old Brazilian girl’s abortion have been overruled.

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/03/28/world/americas/28brazil.html?ref=world

“The doctors’ actions set off a swirl of controversy. A Brazilian archbishop summarily excommunicated everyone involved — the doctors for performing the abortion and the girl’s mother for allowing it — except for the stepfather, who stands accused of raping the girl over a number of years.

“The law of God is above any human law,” said José Cardoso Sobrinho, the archbishop, who argued that while rape was bad, abortion was even worse.

The storm intensified when a high-ranking Vatican official supported the excommunications. But then a conference of Brazilian bishops overruled Archbishop Sobrinho, saying that the child’s mother had acted “under pressure” from doctors who said the girl would die if she carried the babies to term, and that only doctors who “systematically” performed abortions should be thrown out of the church.

Finally, the Vatican’s top bioethics official, Archbishop Rino Fisichella, also criticized the initial stance, saying the “credibility of our teaching took a blow as it appeared, in the eyes of many, to be insensitive, incomprehensible and lacking mercy.””