Italy's abortion law could be up for revision, leader says

ROME — Italy's law permitting abortion might be up for revision, a Cabinet minister suggested in an interview published Tuesday, after a Vatican-backed voter boycott helped defeat efforts to ease restrictions on assisted procreation and embryo research.

"Today's Italy has proven to be different from that of yesterday, more attentive to the values of the Catholic tradition," Regional Affairs Minister Enrico La Loggia told the newspaper La Stampa. "These principles for the protection of life that are being affirmed today must be taken into account."

Revision of the abortion law would not occur in the immediate future, La Loggia said, but he added, "I don't rule out opening a reflection on that to see if everything worked well, to see if it's possible to push toward solutions that are more apt for today."

However, other ministers and a top church official suggested the abortion law wouldn't be touched — an indication of how sensitive the issue is in this overwhelmingly Roman Catholic but largely secular country.

Abortion in the first three months of pregnancy has been legal in Italy since 1978. The law survived several attempts to overturn it, including a referendum backed by the Vatican in 1981. Italians upheld abortion on that occasion, dealing a blow to the late Pope John Paul II, who campaigned vigorously against abortion.

Cardinal Camillo Ruini, the head of the Italian bishops' conference who had championed the boycott campaign for the Sunday and Monday referendum on assisted fertility, denied that the abortion law was the church's next target.

"I have read about that, too. I really don't know how they invented that," Ruini told private Canale 5 news.

Pope Benedict XVI recently reiterated the Roman Catholic Church's opposition to abortion, stressing the "intangibility of human life from conception to its natural end" — a phrase that in Vatican teaching refers to the church's bans on abortion and euthanasia.

Ruini, Benedict's vicar for Rome, declined to describe the Roman Catholic Church as the winner in the assisted fertility referendum.

"What really won was the moral conscience of our people and the future of man himself," Ruini said in an interview on private Canale 5's news Monday.

The referendum was widely seen as a test of the church's influence in this overwhelmingly Catholic country.

Only 25.9 percent of the electorate voted. A turnout of more than 50 percent was required to make the vote valid.