LISBON, Portugal, November 12, 2015 (LifeSiteNews)

Cristiano Ronaldo, a Portuguese soccer is alive today only because the law at his conception prohibited a legal abortion, and he survived in utero an illegal, but ineffective folkloric alternative abortion method.

Ronaldo’s origins have come under focus recently because of a just-released documentary film, Ronaldo, and a recent book.

The film is structured around Ronaldo’s intense desire to win the league’s best player award—the Ballon d’Or—over soccer rival Lionel Messi.

But The London Telegraph observes, “At the edge of the frame is an insightful and rather sad portrait of addiction, loneliness and a yearning to fill a hole that can never be filled.” The Telegraph says that need is to please a father who was first absent because of alcoholism and then because of an early, drink-induced death.

The issue may go earlier, however, to mother Dolores’ attempt to abort him. Unhappy at raising a child with the drunk her husband had become, she sought a neighbour’s advice. She prescribed boiled black beer to terminate the pregnancy. The baby survived but, as Dolores admitted to Ronaldo’s biographer, Guillem Balague, “He was an unwanted child.”

From a young age he decided to be the world’s greatest soccer player and, at 12, left home for big city soccer.

So while journalists focus on Ronaldo’s unquenchable need for his father’s approval, students of Post-Abortion Survivor’s Syndrome will suspect the mother’s role too. As observed in many clients by Victoria B.C.-area psychotherapist Philip Ney, the syndrome is characterized by a survivor’s driving need to please the parents who let him live.

Commenting on the star’s life in the British paper, The Catholic Herald, Fr. Alexander Lucie-Smith said Portugal’s pro-life laws clearly saved the star’s life. “Nowadays, a woman in Mrs Ronaldo’s position would perhaps be given a doctor-assisted abortion with no questions asked. Luckily for Ronaldo and football fans the world over, that was not the case in 1984. The implication is clear: restrictive laws with regard to abortion save lives.”