In commenting the legal amendments of the option for same-sex couples to adopt children, approved in Portugal last week by a parliamentary majority of leftist parties and 19 leaders of the social democratic party, the cardinal patriarch of Lisbon, Manuel Clemente, stated that the Portuguese Catholic Church will keep defending its beliefs on life and the family, advocating “the importance of a male and female figure in the raising of children”. “We believe in the truth of life, from conception to natural death, and in its development in a family environment, in the fecund complementarity of a man and a woman”, Clemente stated. Last Friday, the Portuguese Parliament also repealed some rules that attenuated the abortion law, which had been introduced by the previous legislature on the back of the citizens’ initiative “For the right to be born”, whereby women had to meet a psychologist and a social worker, and conscientious objector doctors had to attend all the steps in the decision-making process in the event of abortion. According to the cardinal patriarch of Lisbon, however, “the repealing of such measures is not a defeat of democratic participation, that enables all citizens to express their opinions and make proposals; actually such movements will go on and will expand, because there are fundamental truths at stake here that cannot be given up”.