Italian babies... and not.

San Bartolomeo, Italy (Feb 7, 2005)

For the first time since I came to US from Italy, I had the opportunity to vote via mail. On Thursday I received the ballots from the italian Consulate in Boston, where I am registered. I have voted, and then sent the ballots back via mail. That’s nice because for eight years I didn’t have the chance to vote as until now italians couldn’t vote from abroad.

These are not, in fact, regular elections, but rather a “referendum”. In a referendum the electorate can reject an existing law, in totality or in part. Referendum cannot approve new laws, but only remove existing ones, or change their meaning by selectively removing part of them. This is the way referendums are usually done: remove the word “not” from the third sentence in the second chapter of the fifth title of article thirteen of law such and such, and voilá, a law is transformed into its opposite. Kind of complicated, but nobody pretends italian politics to be easy to understand (this is the legacy of having a legal system based on a code established 2000 years ago at the times of the Romans). Using this mechanism Italy had introduced divorce, allowed abortion and has opted out from using nuclear power as an energy source. To be successful a referendum needs at least 50% of the voters to cast their ballots, and of course a majority of “yes”. This is not always the case, as referenda are usually done while summer is approaching and people tend to go to the beach (elections in Italy are held during the weekends).

This time, however, is quite important for people to go to cast their ballots. The law that needs to be changed concerns assisted procreation. The law was introduced last year by the right-wing italian government, with the support of the Catholic Church, and was designed to curb the possibility of having stem cell and therapeutic cloning research, putting at the same time restrictions on assisted procreation and attacking the legality of abortion. The referendums in particular attempt to repel four parts of the law:

1) The current law forbids to extract stem cells from leftover embryos from fertility treatments, effectively blocking what is the single most promising technique for curing many deadly diseases. At the same time California had opened the way for this kind of research (and even the conservative US Congress is evaluating the possibility of doing the same on a national scale) Italy has a law prohibiting it in all its forms.

2) The current law prohibit the fertilization of more than three eggs at the same time, during the fertility treatment, and impose the implantation of all of them after fertilization. Despite the advances in the technology of artificial insemination, this procedure has still an elevated failure rate. Limiting the number of eggs that can be fertilized at each time means that the procedure will likely need to be repeated many times to have any chance of success. A fertility treatment is a taxing procedure for the woman, and having to repeat it multiple times is dangerous for her heath. The most horrible part of the law, however, is the prohibition of doing a medical analysis of the embryos to be implanted and the imposition that all of them need to be implanted. This means that even malformed embryos will have to be implanted, increasing the risks for the mother and the possibility of an abortion during the course of the pregnancy. It finally forces the woman to have the embryos implanted even if she has changed her mind after the fertilization process, which basically amounts to forcing the woman to have a complicated medical procedure against her will.

3) The third part of the law that the referendum wants to repel establishes that the fertilized egg (even before the embryo is formed) has the same right of the mother. This is quite unique in the world, where even the most restrictive laws about abortion concerns the embryo, or the fetus, and not certainly an egg that can be viable or not. This is in contrast with the current law allowing abortion in Italy, and can be used to effectively revoke the right of abortion (it is worth noting that the number of abortions in Italy has actually diminished since abortion is legal thanks to the provisions that, removing it from illegality, offer other options and counseling to pregnant women).

4) The last provision to be revoked is the one that effectively prohibits the use of donated sperm and eggs, forcing the couples needing this treatment to go to some other european countries to do the treatment. Of course you need money for this (while fertility treatment in Italy is completely free, as part of universal free health care), so this law discriminates the access to the treatment on the basis of economical situation.

I understand this is an entry quite longer than usual for my blog, but I really feel this is quite an important issue. It is no mystery that I don’t like what the right-wing government is doing in my country, and this law is one of the many horrors it has introduced, setting back the italian society in ways that I thought were not possible for a modern country. I really hope that enough italians will understand the importance of voting on this issue, and will listen to the voices of many scientists and women associations that have fought to have this law repelled. It won’t be easy, though, in a country where a conservative Church has still a lot of power, and where the prime minister personally owns the three main commercial television channels, and controls the three state-owned ones. The referendum will be on the second weekend of June: let’s hope the italians will not go to the beach for that time.

The baby in the photo is my niece Letizia, and my father is holding her. I took this photo in February, when she was barely three months old. It seemed an appropriate photo for this entry.

On other news, Photoblogs Magazine is running an interview I made with Wanda Scott, of Cariboo Images and Thoughts. Go have a look!