THE Vatican and Catholic politicians on Friday reacted with dismay to a decision by Italy's drugs agency to approve limited use of the abortion pill Mifepristone, which has been available in much of the rest of Europe since the 1990s.

Senior Vatican officials said women who took the pill would be excommunicating themselves, as would doctors who prescribed it and nurses who administered it. Because of the high proportion of conscientious objectors to abortion in the Italian health service — some 70 per cent — it is likely that use of the pill will be circumscribed.

After a reportedly heated four-hour session that ended late on Thursday, the board of the Italian pharmaceuticals agency, AIFA, voted by four to one to approve Mifepristone. But it stipulated that the pill should only be administered in hospital during the first seven weeks of pregnancy.

Also known as RU-486, Mifepristone had already been in use in some Italian regions on a trial basis.

For Silvio Berlusconi's government and its supporters, this was a delicate moment for any announcement bearing on sexual ethics. Recordings purportedly made by a prostitute who claims that she spent the night with Italy's 72-year-old married prime minister have focused public attention on his own apparently wide-ranging sex life. In one, a businessman who allegedly supplied women for parties at Berlusconi's home can be heard warning one of them that the prime minister never uses birth control measures.

Berlusconi had no immediate comment to make. The reaction of other Italian politicians cut across party boundaries, though most of the censure came from the right, dominated by the governing Freedom People movement.

Livia Turco, health minister in the previous, centre-left government when the trials began two years
ago, said the drug had been subjected to a “rigorous investigative process during which the medical aspects and the compatibility of [Mifepristone] with Italian legislation were scrupulously evaluated”. But Paola Binetti, a member of the same party, sharply criticised the approval of what she termed “do-it-yourself abortion”.

Mifepristone has other medical uses and can be used as an emergency contraceptive if taken after sex but before ovulation. Its active compound was discovered by French researchers in 1980. The drug is marketed in the United States as Mifeprex and in the rest of the world as Mifegyne. The drug is not legal in Ireland or Poland. — The Guardian, Londo