Luminous
A Catholic Woman and Her Thoughts on Life, the Universe, and Everything
Monday, August 03, 2009
Church threatens excommunication as Italy green lights abortion pill
Defying Vatican opposition, Italy has authorised the used of the abortion drug Mifepristone, also known as RU-486. The Church is threatening to excommunicate doctors who prescribe the pill and women who take it.
 
The Italian Pharmaceuticals Agency (AIFA) announced its decision to authorise the pill late on Thursday after a long meeting during which it was lobbied intensely by the Church and Catholic politicians, Reuters reported.
 
"There will be excommunication for the doctor, the woman and anyone who encourages its use," said Monsignor Elio Sgreccia, emeritus president of the Pontifical Academy for Life and the pope's top expert on bioethical issues.
 
"First abortion was legalised to stop it being clandestine, but now doctors are washing their hands of it and transferring the burden of conscience to women," he told reporters.
 
The abortion pill has already been given experimentally in some Italian regions but the AIFA ruling means it will now be legally available throughout the country.
 
Although Italian law states that all abortions must take place in a hospital and AIFA's stipulation that Mifepristone can only be given in hospital, critics of the new move said some women were bound to abort at home without medical assistance, the report added.
 
"It intrinsically means women will have abortions at home, because the moment of expulsion is not predictable," Reuters quoted senior health ministry official Eugenia Roccella saying.
 
She said authorisation of the RU-486 pill had been "heavily sponsored by politicians" and questioned its safety record.
 
Italy legalised abortion on demand through the end of the third month of pregnancy in 1978, the Associated Press reported. Abortion after three months is allowed when the pregnancy is deemed a "grave danger" to the woman's "mental or physical health".
 
Three years later, Italians voted in a referendum to keep the law, again defying a Church backed campaign.
 
Archbishop Rino Fisichella, who heads the Vatican's Pontifical Academy for Life, issued a strong condemnation of abortion and the RU-486 pill in a front page article in Vatican newspaper L'Osservatore Romano on Friday. He said the Church cannot passively sit back, and insisted the ethical implications of the pill could not be overlooked.
 
"An embryo is not a bunch of cells," Fisichella wrote. "It's real and full human life. Suppressing it is a responsibility nobody can take without fully knowing the consequences."
Written at 10:32 PM by Luminaria2112.
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