ローマ教皇庁のお膝元イタリアでも、ついに初期中絶薬RU486が認可されました。以下は10日付BBC Newsのサイトから一部引用します。
Abortion pill gets final approval in Italy
The sale of the abortion pill RU486 has been given final approval in Italy, despite protests from the Vatican and the government in the Catholic country.
Unlike in other European countries, the pill, also known as mifepristone, will be administered solely in hospitals.
The pill was originally approved by the country's pharmaceuticals agency in late July, but the move prompted a parliamentary inquiry.
Italy was is one of the last European states to make it available.
11日付けのブログ新聞the Huffington Pressでは、侵襲性の低い中絶方法だとして歓迎しています。
RU-486 Abortion Drug To Be Allowed In Italy Despite Vatican's Protests
ROME ― Italy has approved the use of the abortion drug RU-486, capping years of debate and defying opposition from the Vatican, which warned of immediate excommunication for doctors prescribing the pill and for women who use it.
The pill is already available in a number of other European countries. Its approval by Italy's drug regulation authorities was praised by women's groups and pro-choice organizations, which say the pill will provide women with an additional, noninvasive procedure.
It drew the immediate protest of the Catholic Church, which opposes abortion and contraception.
"That's not how you alleviate human suffering, that's not how you help women, that's not how you help mankind," Monsignor Elio Sgreccia, a senior church bioethicist, said in an interview Friday with Associated Press Television News.
The Italian Drug Agency ruled after a meeting that ended late Thursday that the drug, which terminates pregnancy by causing the embryo to detach from the uterine wall, cannot be sold in pharmacies but can only be administered by doctors in a hospital.
The agency said in a statement that the pill can only be taken up to the seventh week of pregnancy, and not up to the ninth as is the case in other countries. Women who used the pill between the seventh and the ninth week of pregnancy incurred more risks and had often needed surgery, it said.
The decision is expected to be effective in about two months, the agency said.
In a nod to the ethical implications associated with the decision and the controversy surrounding it, the agency noted that "the task of protecting the well-being of citizens ... must take precedence over personal convictions."
The 4-1 vote at the agency's executive branch comes about two years after the agency first started looking at the issue. The pill became available in some parts of Italy on an experimental basis in 2006.
For the Catholic Church, the agency's decision was the latest defeat in its efforts to ban or restrict abortion in the nation that hosts the Vatican.
Italy legalized abortion on demand through the end of the third month of pregnancy in 1978, after a long battle between secular forces and the church. 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."
Sgreccia, who called the RU-486 "not a drug, but poison," said that women taking the pill or doctors administering are automatically excommunicated under church law.
There were about 121,000 abortions on demand in Italy in 2008, according to figures provided by Italy's health authorities. That number was down 48 percent from 1982 – the year when the number peaked after the referendum upholding the abortion law – and down 4 percent compared to the previous year.
But critics of RU-486 say that taking a pill might reverse that trend because it would make interrupting a pregnancy easier. They also fear that it would be possible to avert a mandatory hospitalization policy and effectively go back to the pre-legislation days of clandestine abortions performed at home without medical supervision.
"The apparent ease of this pharmacological method will inevitably lower the level of caution and responsibility," Romano Colozzi, the only member of the agency to vote against the use of the pill, told the ANSA news agency.
Supporters say it has no significant side effects and is safe.
Gabriella Pacini, a doctor with the Woman's Life group that provides medical counseling to women, said that 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?" she said.
The RU-486 pill, first introduced in France two decades ago, is known chemically as mifepristone and causes an embryo to detach from the uterine wall. A second pill, misoprostol, is used afterward to cause contractions and push the embryo out of the uterus.
Doctors can declare themselves conscientious objectors and refuse to carry out abortions.
Since 2000, Italy also allows the so-called morning-after pill, which prevents a fertilized egg from implanting in the uterine wall and growing into an embryo.
10日付けAFP BB newsのサイトでは、簡単ですが日本語で読めます。
【12月10日 AFP】イタリア医薬品庁（AIFA）は9日、バチカンや政府閣僚などが反発していた経口中絶薬「RU486」の発売を正式に認可した。ただし他の認可国と異なり、イタリアでは病院内で中絶手術の代わりとしてのみ使用される見込みだという。
AIFAは当初、7月31日にRU486の販売を認可したが、その後、カトリック信者が大多数を占めるイタリア国内で反対の声が高まり、伊議会上院委員会は同庁に再検討を要請していた。
RU486の認可をめぐっては、アルフレド・マントバーノ（Alfredo Mantovano）内務副大臣が、「生命を終わらせる薬」を単なる風邪薬の類に分類することと同じだと批判。また、ローマ法王庁生命アカデミー（Pontifical Academy for Life）の元委員長、エリオ・スグレッチア（Elio Sgreccia）司教は、RU486を「極めて有害な毒」と表現し、「使用した医師や女性、推進者は破門する」とまで語っていた。
一方、RU486の開発者であるフランスのエティエンヌ・ボリュー（Etienne Baulieu）氏は、3ヶ月前ローマ（Rome）で開かれた会議で、イタリアについてRU486を利用できない「唯一の欧州主要国」だとの事実を訴えていた。
RU486は仏エクセルジン（Exelgyn）が欧州向けに製造しており、フランスでは1988年に「ミフェプリストン（Mifepristone）」の名前で販売が認可されている。同社は2年前、インターネットでの販売も始めている。(c)AFP
ただし「ミフェプリストン」というのは物質名で、ヨーロッパでの商品名はMifegyneのはずです。お間違えなく。
