The Italian Catholic Church appears to be gunning for another battle to change Italy's abortion law, saying it was time to reevaluate the 30-year-old legislation following a recent botched abortion involving twins.Cardinal Camillo Ruini, former head of the influential Italian bishops' conference and the pope's vicar for Rome, said Tuesday it was not only right but necessary to look again at the law in light of medical advances over the last three decades.
Debate over Italy's law reignited last month after a botched abortion involving twins was performed in a Milan hospital.
Doctors performing a "selective" abortion were supposed to have terminated one of the babies diagnosed with a genetic condition.
Instead, they aborted the healthy baby, after the fetuses apparently changed position during the procedure.
Abortion up to the end of the third month of pregnancy in state hospitals was legalized in predominantly Catholic Italy in 1978, after a long battle between the Vatican and secular forces.
In a conference outside Rome, Ruini said the "cultural condition" did not exist now for overturning the law altogether, but he said it could at least be improved upon. He did not offer details.
The Italian religious affairs weekly Famiglia Cristiana devotes this week's issue to the topic, saying the law contains outdated medical information, such as the minimum gestation at which a fetus is viable. It also said it was time to change the law.
Italy's health minister, Livia Turco, immediately dismissed any move to revise the law, saying its existence was responsible for lowering Italy's abortion rate.
Since 1982, the recourse to abortion has gone down 45 percent and continues to decline, she said
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