Italy is on fire over the RU 486 pill. More than a quarter-century after its introduction in France, the "abortion pill" is still forbidden in the Peninsula, but the debate has been re-launched there by the pressure from regional health authorities against Minister of Health Francesco Storace. The latter, after authorizing, then suspending, a first experiment in a Turin hospital at the end of September, is assailed with demands. After Piedmont, the Liguria, Lombardy, Umbria and Latium regions have registered requests to conduct tests. From the autonomous province of Trent to the principal hospital in Rome, requests for authorization are launched almost every day throughout the country. Tuesday, November 15, Tuscany took an additional step by authorizing the hospitals under its jurisdiction to prescribe RU 486 without even a green light from the minister. Some establishments have indicated that they will buy the famous pill directly from abroad.
Signature Campaign
"At the moment when the 2006 budget plan tries to encourage families to have children, the regions are competing to assure that they don't," Mr. Storace complained Tuesday. The argument keeps bouncing back into morality. "This competition encourages abortion and frankly, that's not a pretty sight," the minister added. For the Osservatore romano, the Vatican's official daily newspaper, "the regions are in the process of transforming themselves into avant-garde standard-bearers for the negation of the values of life, and that in the name of a poorly-understood government secularism."
The debate rages at a time when the Italian Church is accused of "interference" in politics, especially with respect to social questions. Camillo Ruini, president of the Italian Church Council (CEI), used all his weight in the spring to make a referendum on artificial insemination fail. "A Church that kept quiet about these matters would do no honor to itself or to Italy," was how he justified himself on Monday, November 14, at the opening of the bishops' General Assembly. He repeated that the RU 486 pill "contributes to distracting attention away from the true nature of abortion, which is and remains the suppression of an innocent human life."
A consumer association has launched a signature campaign to legalize the abortion pill: 70,000 signatures have already been collected, but hesitations about voluntary interruption of pregnancy (VIP) - whatever the method - are still numerous, even among medical bodies. A parliamentary report indicates that 83.3% of gynecologists in the Basilicate region, at the extreme southern tip of the Peninsula, and 80.5% in Venetia (in the Northeast) refuse to practice traditional VIPs. These statistics arouse the indignation of Daniele Capezzone, secretary of the Radical Italians, the party in the forefront of these questions: "That means that thirty-seven years after the legalization of abortion, for millions of Italian women, the free choice to interrupt pregnancy remains purely theoretical."
Translation: t r u t h o u t French language correspondent Leslie Thatcher.
