A SENIOR Vatican figure has threatened Catholics with excommunication if they choose to use the abortion drug RU-486.
Responding to Wednesday’s decision of the Italian Pharmaceuticals Agency (AIFA) to allow the use of RU-486 in Italy, Msgr Elio Sgreccia, a former president of the Pontifical Academy for Life and a Vatican expert on bioethical issues, told daily Corriere Della Sera: “This is a compound which kills the foetus and one much promoted by the pharmaceutical industry. It is an incitement to abort. It is absolutely unacceptable and leads to automatic excommunication.”
In a front-page article in yesterday’s Vatican daily, L’Osservatore Romano, the current president of the Pontifical Academy for Life, Archbishop Rino Fisichella, also issued a strong condemnation of the abortion pill.
“An embryo is not a bunch of cells. It is a real and full human life and to suppress it is a responsibility no one can take without fully realising the consequences.”
Wednesday’s decision represents yet another telling defeat for the Vatican in its 30-year losing battle to ban abortion in Italy, home of Catholic Church governance. Abortion on demand up to the end of the third month of pregnancy has been legal in Italy since 1978. After a long, often bitter battle between secular forces and the church, Italians in 1981 voted to keep that 1978 legislation.
Developed in the early 1980s in France, RU-486 or mifepristone is an approved prescription drug in the US and many European countries, although not in Ireland. In its Wednesday ruling, AIFA decided that RU-486 could not be sold in pharmacies but rather only administered by doctors in a hospital.
RU-486 terminates pregnancy by causing the embryo to detach from the uterine wall. A second pill, misoprostol, is used afterwards to provoke contractions and push the embryo out of the uterus.
AIFA’s ruling stipulates that the drug can only be taken up to the seventh week of pregnancy, not the ninth as in several countries.
While senior church figures criticised the measure, with Dr Fisichella pointing out that some women had died after taking RU-486, feminists and campaigners for women’s rights welcomed the legalisation of the pill.
Gabriella Pacini, a doctor with the Woman’s Life group which provides medical counselling to women, said: “RU-486 has been used for years in Europe on millions of women and is considered safe and effective. Why not give Italian women a choice between pharmacological abortion and surgical abortion?”