Abortion looms as election issue in Italy for first time in decades

ROME – Condemnation from an increasingly influential Catholic Church is turning abortion into an election issue in Italy nearly three decades after it was legalized.

Both the right-wing ruling coalition and the left-wing opposition are scrambling ahead of parliamentary polls expected by April to come up with policies to encourage women to have their babies.

While no mainstream parties advocate making abortion illegal again, both sides have recently supported giving cash benefits to women during pregnancy or after birth – widely seen as a way of encouraging women not to have abortions.

Those initiatives follow a recent blaze of criticism of abortion by Italian bishops and one cardinal’s denunciation of the RU-486 abortion pill as “suppression of innocent human life.”

Abortion up to the end of the third month of pregnancy was legalized by this predominantly Catholic nation in 1978 after a long battle between the Vatican and lay forces. The law was upheld in a referendum three years later.

Since then, abortion rates in Italy have dropped steadily, from 234,801 abortions in 1982 to 136,715 in 2004. Concern is also growing about Italy’s birth rate, one of the lowest in Europe. The population is about 58 million.

Last month, Health Minister Francesco Storace won praise from the Vatican newspaper – and criticism from the opposition – when he proposed sending Catholic volunteers to state-funded advice centers to discourage women from having abortions.

“Abortion has been a non-issue for more than 30 years, and now it’s become hot,” said James Walston, a professor of politics at the American University of Rome.

The government proposed in the budget to give a cash benefit to mothers after they give birth.

The center-left opposition Margherita party has since come up with its own proposal, under which the state would pay $412 a month from the third month of pregnancy until birth for single women earning less than $29,400 a year – and a smaller amount for housewives, unemployed women or women who do not have maternity benefits and whose total household income is less than $47,000.

The Vatican newspaper L’Osservatore Romano recently condemned abortion as going “against woman’s dignity, against a person’s rights.”

Luigi Laratta, president of the Italian Association of Demographic Education, a family planning organization, said the Catholic church became bolder after a referendum last April to ease assisted fertility restrictions failed to get enough Italians out to vote to make it binding. The Italian bishops had urged citizens to boycott it.

The elections will pit the center-right bloc led by Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi against a center-left bloc, including the Margherita Party, likely to be led by Romano Prodi.

Analysts say the Vatican’s support is increasingly important for winning at the polls.

But Franco Pavoncello, a political science professor at John Cabot University in Rome, said that repealing abortion remains unlikely.

“For the greatest part of Italians (legalized abortion) is a sign of civility – painful but necessary,” Pavoncello said. “My gut feeling is that the average Italian doesn’t want to reopen the abortion issue.”