This, from the Washington Post.  The head of bioethics at the Vatican responds:

In contrast with church authorities’ typically uncompromising statements on abortion, Fisichella stressed the degree of moral discretion that the doctors were forced to exercise.

“The conscience of the physician finds itself alone when forced to decide the best thing to do,” he wrote. “A choice like that of having to save a life, knowing that one puts a second at serious risk, never comes easily.”

The article did not explicitly mention the girl’s mother, who was excommunicated for authorizing the abortion. Church officials have said the girl is not under threat of excommunication.

Another extraordinary aspect of Fisichella’s article was its frank rebuke of José Cardoso Sobrinho, archbishop of Olinda and Recife, whom it accused of having “rushed” to declare the excommunications — “a judgment as heavy as a meat cleaver” — when his first task should have been the pastoral care of the victim.

Cardoso Sobrinho’s action harmed the “credibility of our teaching, which appears in the eyes of so many as insensitive, incomprehensible and lacking in mercy,” Fisichella wrote.

Because church law requires the automatic excommunication of anyone who collaborates in an abortion, Fisichella wrote, “there was no need . . . for such urgency and publicity” in declaring the fact.

Fisichella’s article also implicitly contradicted Cardinal Giovanni Battista Re, head of the Vatican’s Congregation for Bishops, who had publicly defended Cardoso Sobrinho’s action earlier this month.

Vatican officials rarely air their differences in public, let alone on the front page of the pope’s newspaper.

According to respected Vatican journalist Sandro Magister, Fisichella’s article was probably approved in advance by Cardinal Tarcisio Bertone, who as secretary of state is considered the Vatican’s No. 2 official, after Pope Benedict XVI.