“I have had occasion to return to the subject of abortion recently,” Pope Francis said in an October 14 address to participants in a conference organized by the Italian Society of Hospital Pharmacy. “You know that I am very clear about this: it is a homicide and it is not licit to become an accomplice.”

“Having said that, our duty is to be close to people, our positive duty: to be close to situations, especially women, so that they do not come to think of the abortion solution, because in reality it is not the solution,” the Pope continued. “Then after ten, twenty, thirty years, life sends you the bill. And you have to be in a confessional to understand the price of this, which is so hard.”