After a heated four-hour session on Friday, Italy’s drug regulation agency announced its decision following opposition from the church and Catholic politicians, including many from Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi’s centre- Right government. The Vatican, which has battled in the United Nations and other forums to halt the acceptance of the abortion pill, reacted with dismay to the decision to approve limited use of Mifepristone that has been available in much of the rest of Europe since the 1990s.
Archbishop Rino Fisichella, head of the Pope’s thinktank on bioethical issues, the Pontifical Academy for Life, said: “The fact of taking a pill may be less traumatic for a woman, but it does not change the substance. It is still abortion.”
He underlined that the consequences for a Catholic —automatic excommunication — were “the same as those for surgical abortion,” the Guardian reported on Saturday.
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