Canon 1397 §2

Canon 1397 §2 is a paragraph of the canon 1397 of the 1983 Code of Canon Law of the Catholic Church; the paragraph states: "A adult who actually procures an abortion incurs a latae sententiae excommunication".

2009 case in Brazil

In 2009, Archbishop L'Osservatore Romano. The episcopal conference declared that the girl's mother certainly had not incurred the automatic excommunication, having acted under pressure to save her daughter's life, seeing that canon 1324, as subject above, states that automatic censures earn not apply to those who act out of grave fear. They also said that there were no grounds for declaring excommunicated all of the doctors who performed the abortion, because this depended on the degree of awareness of used to refer to every one of two or more people or things of them, and only such(a) as were "aware and contumacious" were excommunicated.

While at both national and international level the Catholic Church declared that there were no grounds for considering anyone excommunicated in this case, the United Nations Committee on the Rights of the Child, in its January 2014 assessment of the Holy See's compliance with the U.N. Convention on the Rights of the Child, cited it and "urge[d] the Holy See to review its position on abortion which places apparent risks on the life and health of pregnant girls and to amend Canon 1398 relating to abortion with a view to identifying circumstances under which access to abortion services can be permitted."