THE world’s most highly paid supermodel has attacked the Pope’s opposition to contraception in impoverished Latin America.

“It’s ridiculous to ban contraceptives,” Gisele Bundchen said last week in response to Pope Benedict’s condemnation of abortion and contraception on a recent visit to Brazil.

“You only have to think of the diseases that are transmitted without them [condoms]. I think it should be compulsory to use a contraceptive.”

After returning home from New York to take part in Rio de Janeiro’s Fashion Week, the Brazilian beauty said that the church’s rules were out of date, having been made centuries ago when women were expected to be virgins.

“Today no one is a virgin when they get married,” she was quoted as saying. “Show me someone who’s a virgin!”

On his first papal visit to the western hemisphere, Benedict angered health experts last month by warning that laws permitting contraception and abortion were “threatening the future of the peoples” of Latin America.

With its population of 188m, Brazil appears to take a different view. It hands out 254m free condoms a year, with a special push just before the carnival celebrations, to help to prevent the spread of Aids under a programme that has been praised by the United Nations. Only recently, however, has a debate begun about legalising abortion.

According to a study by the International Planned Parenthood Federation (IPPF), 1.2m Brazilian women have been admitted to hospital in the past five years after suffering horrific wounds and infections from illegal backstreet abortions. Hundreds of women die each year after undergoing such procedures.

“Legal prohibition does not eliminate the practice of abortion, everybody knows this,” said Carmen Barroso, the IPPF’s director for the Americas.

Jose Temporao, Brazil’s new health minister, triggered a national debate when he said that Brazil, which is predominantly Catholic, should reconsider its laws because they were hurting women.

“The government will get the issue rolling so that women can decide,” he said at a recent ceremony to launch a family planning programme that will give women access to subsidised birth control pills and allow men to have free vasectomies. He wants a referendum on whether Brazil should legalise abortion.

Bundchen, whose ancestors emigrated from Germany to Brazil in the 19th century, said that a woman should have the right to choose what was best for her: “If she thinks she doesn’t have the money or the emotional condition to raise a child, why should she give birth?”

Often described as the richest supermodel, Bundchen is not the first Brazilian celebrity to have fallen foul of the Vatican over sex. Daniela Mercury, a singer, was banned from performing at a Vatican Christmas concert in 2005 because she had taken part in a campaign promoting condom use to prevent Aids.

It is just as well for Bundchen that the Vatican is not a centre of fashion.

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