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Catholic World News News Feature

Angry responses to Pope's call for conscientious objection by pharmacists October 30, 2007

Italy's health minister has denounced a call by Pope Benedict XVI for pharmacists to refrain from dispensing abortifacient pills. "I don't think his warning to pharmacists, to be conscientious objectors to the morning-after pill, should be taken into consideration," the health minister, Livia Turco, told the daily Corriere della Sera. Turco was responding to the statement made by the Pontiff on October 29, in a meeting with members of the International Federation of Catholic Pharmacists. The Pope had said that pharmacists should never "collaborate directly or indirectly in supplying products that have clearly immoral purposes." If the laws allow for sales of such products, Pope Benedict said, pharmacists must "face the question of conscientious objection."

Spokesmen for Italian pharmacists remarked that the country's laws do not provide a "conscience clause" allowing them to refuse dispensing such pills. "The law obliges us to sell pharmaceuticals, whatever their nature, if there is a doctor's prescription," Giacomo Leopardi told the ANSA news service.

Another spokesman for a pharmacist's group, Franco Caprino, said: "We can't be conscientious objectors unless the law is changed." (Caprino may have mistaken the meaning of the Pope's statement, since conscientious objection usually implies that an individual challenges an existing regulation, accepting the legal consequences.)

Other Italian political figures had strictly partisan reactions to the Pope's statement. Lidia Menapace of the Communist Reformation party said that the Pontiff was guilty of a "serious intrusion" into the political sphere. And Green party parliamentarian Gianpaolo Silvestri asked ANSA, "Will we ever see the day when the papacy overcomes its fears of the female body and of women's right to self-determination?"