A Glimpse of our Future?
Italy's Reproductive War
Does Life Begin at Conception?
By Alexander Smoltczyk
service.spiegel.de
Italians will soon go to the polls to vote on the nation's strict law regarding artificial reproduction. Some say the law puts women's lives at risk and quashes important medical research. Others -- including the pope -- insist it protects the unborn from a violent death.
The upcoming referendum on reproductive rights has split Italy. Here, activists led by former European Commissioner Emma Bonino demonstrate for a Yes vote.
It's a battle of life and death in Italy. That, at least, is the impression one gets from the posters pasted all over Rome. Saucer-sized, baby-blues stare out from the placards, imploring passersby with the following: "If you defend life, then don't vote this time."
The opposing camp's message is just as visible. On their posters, a made-for-television doctor dramatically announces the impending demise of all research. The real-life campaign is just as dramatic; in a number of Italian cities, fertility doctors have gone on hunger strikes to pressure television stations into providing at least a minimum of information about the dispute. The campaign has even washed over into Germany, where posters in Munich's subway system urge Italians living in the country to make their voices heard.
Catholic Web sites -- supported by bishops across the country and the Pope himself -- have also, predictably, weighed in on the issue. The impression they are giving is that nothing short of infanticide will be up for vote in next weekend's referendum.
At stake is a set of amendments to a law that went into effect last year that extended protection of human life to the point of conception. Since then, surrogate motherhood and the use of human embryos for research purposes have been barred in Italy, as has anonymous insemination using sperm banks. The legislation also limits the number of egg cells that can be fertilized to three per attempt, and all three must be implanted into the woman at the same time. The storage of egg cells is also prohibited, a provision that has serious consequences for genetic research in Italy -- once an international leader in the field.
Italians will be casting their "Si" or "No" votes on whether or not to eliminate certain sections of the law. And the dispute has so inflamed passions on both sides of the issue that enormous rifts have developed across Italian society and even within almost all political parties in the country. The Minister of Equal Opportunity, Stefania Prestigiacomo, for example, is a member of the Committee of "Women for a Yes Vote." In contrast, her Christian Democrat colleague in the cabinet, Carlo Giovanardi, has had "No" posters slapped on walls in Modena that portray Nazi troops. The message? They too would have voted Yes.
Italians are struggling with how to balance the rights of the unborn with the rights of women and families.
Likewise, Foreign Minister Gianfranco Fini's surprising "Si" vote has plunged his party, the National Alliance, into the depths of self-doubt. And although Romano Prodi is the designated leader of the opposition, he is far too devout a Catholic to join his supporters in voting Si. Prodi, like Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi, has so far kept his stance on the issue to himself. Berlusconi, whose government pushed through the law currently up for amendment, is by nature suspicious of matters of conscience.
The sections of Italian law at issue in the referendum were originally passed in 2003. They were pushed through partly in reaction to a fertility doctor who had helped a 61-year-old Sicilian woman become pregnant with the frozen sperm of her husband, who had died ten years earlier.
But the law meant to curb such impregnation extravagance has also produced its share of question marks. The case involving a mother from Catania has direct implications for the legal requirement that all fertilized eggs must be implanted. The twins died shortly after a premature birth because their bodies were too weak to survive the multiple pregnancy. The woman's priest then claimed that she was responsible for the death of her children, and that she was being punished by God for resorting to artificial insemination.
Genetic diagnosis of a fertilized egg cell before implantation is also barred. This means that a woman can be forced to carry a terminally ill fetus for months before the illness is detected by other means and pregnancy can be aborted. Abortion was legalized in Italy in 1978, against tough opposition by the Church.
"It is incomprehensible that a 48-hour embryo should be more worthy of protection than a three-month-old fetus -- especially when we are talking about the same fetus," said Minister Prestigiacomo, pointing out the obvious contradictions in the legislation.
Another issue that remains completely unresolved is what to do with the approximately 30,000 fertilized egg cells currently being stored in freezers at the country's research institutes. The law bars their use for research purposes, but morality precludes simply destroying the egg cells. Meanwhile, a kind of fertility tourism has developed in Italy. Couples are traveling to clinics in Spain, Belgium and Austria in order to get around the strict fertility laws in their own country.
Pope Benedikt XVI has continued the conservative line of his predecessor John Paul II.
The purpose of the referendum is to relax what women's organizations and medical biologists see as excessively restrictive rules. The libertarian Radical Party had originally called for the referendum, hoping to take the new laws completely off the books. But the Italian constitutional court only agreed to approve a referendum over four of its key provisions.
Those who vote "Si" four times will be voicing their approval of embryonic stem cell research, surrogate motherhood and sperm banks, unrestricted choice of implants and the option of choosing artificial insemination for broader reasons than just the sterility of one of the partners.
In covering the debate over the referendum, the Italian press has generally maintained high standards and has reported on the issues involved at length. What is a human being? What should human beings be allowed to do? And why are they able to do these things to a greater extent in South Korea than here in Italy?
The left-leaning Il Manifesto welcomes genetic engineering and its ability to liberate women from the "biological cage." A recent headline in the publication Unita read: "Gruesome law condemns four million to illness." Leading intellectual publication Il Foglio takes the opposite view, and has printed page-long exegeses by Leo Strauss, Joseph Ratzinger, Homer and Galileo to back up its stand.
But it's the Catholic Church that has turned its crusade against the referendum into the summer's most important issue. Cardinal Camillo Ruini, the chairman of the Italian Conference of Bishops, is advising the faithful to abstain from voting, arguing that in doing so they would be fighting off a serious attack on the weakest of human creatures (the referendum needs 50 percent participation to be legally binding.) Ruini also argues that the issue is simply too complex to be decided on via a yes or no vote.
With the demise of the old Christian democracy, the Catholic Church lost its proximity to the state. For this reason, the bishops' campaign against the referendum is also seen as an effort to become involved in domestic politics again. Now that the pope-mania of the Easter season has subsided, Cardinal Ruini is interested in exploring the true state of the Church's cultural hegemony in Italy.
It's a good opportunity for the Church, especially now that it has become clear that Joseph Ratzinger's papacy will be dedicated to battling the relativization of fundamental Christian values. In comments delivered during a conference on families on Monday in Rome, Benedict explicitly addressed marriage and birth control.
Cardinal Camillo Ruini, chairman of the Italian Conference of Bishops has urged Catholics to abstain from the referendum.
"The various forms of the dissolution of matrimony today, like free unions, trial marriages and going up to pseudo-matrimonies by people of the same sex, are rather expressions of an anarchic freedom that wrongly passes for true freedom of man," he said." The pope went on to criticize divorce and artificial contraception -- which he called a "banalization of the human body." "The greatest expression of freedom is not the search for pleasure," he said.
It was Joseph Ratzinger, then prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, who, in the past US presidential election campaign, advised his fellow bishops in the United States to deny the sacrament to those candidates who would not take a decisive stance against abortion. Ratzinger's action was an insult to Catholics and to Democratic candidate John Kerry, and helped boost George W. Bush's re-election campaign.
Now the pope, in his capacity as the Bishop of Rome, has lent his support to the other bishops, but has stopped short of giving Italians his recommendation on how they should vote. Last weekend, Ratzinger told his bishops: "Your commitment is an expression of pastoral concern for every human being who may never become a means, but must always remain an end."
In response, former European Commissioner Emma Bonino promptly characterized the Church's efforts as a "military occupation of 25,000 parishes" by the bishops' conference.
Her colleague in the Radical Party, 75-year-old Marco Pannella, raged against what he called the "embryo as idol," and called upon all medical biologists to occupy their institutions, just as workers occupied the country's factories in 1968.
When all is said and done, the chances of getting 50 percent of all Italians to cast their votes in the referendum are slim -- even slimmer than the chances of successful in-vitro fertilization.
Not only is the subject complex, but the weather in Italy is too hot for many Italians to spend their weekend going to the polls instead of heading for the beach. If turnout is too low, it will be up to the Italian parliament to amend the legislation.
A little more reproduction certainly couldn't hurt the nation. Its low fertility rate is barely higher than that of the Vatican.
Translated from the German by Christopher Sultan
© DER SPIEGEL 23/2005
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