Row over pill may see pro-life activists in Italy's abortion clinics

John Hooper in Rome
Wednesday November 16, 2005

The Guardian

Silvio Berlusconi's government is considering putting pro-life activists into state-funded abortion advice centres to discourage women from terminating their pregnancies.

The move follows a furious dispute over the growing use in Italy of the abortion pill, Mifepristone, which pro-life campaigners fear makes termination of pregnancies easier.

At the Vatican, the pope's chief adviser on health, Cardinal Javier Lozano Barragán, told the Guardian yesterday: "An abortion, small or great, is homicide all the same." His remark was the latest in a string of condemnations by senior church officials of the pill, also known as RU-486.

The Vatican's daily, L'Osservatore Romano, said last month the pill was an example of "science in the service of death" and the Archbishop of Genoa, Cardinal Tarcisio Bertone, has drawn a comparison between the use of the pill and King Herod's massacre of the innocents.

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