"Abortion Becoming Election Issue in Italy"

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."

http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20051202/ap_on_re_eu/italy_abortion

can be considered innocent.

Those old farts need to stay away from subjects they know nothing about, like everything to do with sex, marriage and reproduction.