The normal and noble political gesture by which the Italian Senator Maurizio Gasparri, of the Forza Italia political party, opened the 19th legislature of the Italian republic, with which Sen. Gasparri has been opening legislatures for some time, picking up the moral legacy of the founder of the Italian Movement for Life, Carlo Casini (1935-2020), has stirred and continues to stir a hornet’s nest. Because in Italy trying to say that people have always been people, that is, since they were conceived by mom and dad, is a cultural offense. For many, for too many, people deserving of legal protection in Italy become them, poof!, at some point, by magic, by chance, by decree, by democratic majority decision, by guideline: not by the nature of things. And so Gasparri, dares to propose a law, re-propose a law that protects the human person from conception. Because someday someone will really have to explain how from a non-person undeserving of legal protection a human person can emerge, as if from a magician’s top hat, he will have to tell us at what point the undeserving non-person becomes a deserving person, he will have to tell us why and by the effect of what a non-person becomes a person.
Now, the group Public Agenda “Say it on the Rooftops” has prepared a useful note for those suffering from short memories and unable to distinguish a giraffe from a baby. A brief note on the protection of the conceived under current legal sources, which “iFamNews” makes its own and, with permission of the writer, publishes below.
European Court of Justice, Judgment C-34/10 – Case Oliver Brüstle v. Greenpeace and V – of October 18, 2011: “30. As to the meaning to be given to the notion of “human embryo” provided for in Art. 6, n. 2(c) of the Directive, it should be emphasized that although the definition of the human embryo constitutes a particularly sensitive social issue in many member states, marked by the diversity of their values and traditions, the Court is not called upon by this reference for a preliminary ruling to address medical or ethical issues, but must limit itself to a legal interpretation of the relevant provisions of the Directive (see, to this effect, Case C-506/06 Mayr [2008] ECR I-1017, paragraph 38).
34. Thus, the context and purpose of the directive reveal that the Union legislature intended to exclude any possibility of obtaining a patent when the respect due to human dignity may be affected.
35. It follows from this that the notion of “human embryo” within the meaning of Art. 6, n. 2(c) of the directive should be understood broadly. In this sense, from the stage of its fertilization any human egg must be regarded as a “human embryo,” within the meaning and effect of Art. 6, n. 2(c) of the directive, since fertilization is such as to initiate the process of development of a human being.
38. A “human embryo” constitutes any human ovum since fertilization, any unfertilized human ovum into which the nucleus of a mature human cell has been implanted, and any unfertilized human ovum which, through parthenogenesis, has been induced to divide and develop.”
Law July 29, 1975, no. 405, Art. 1(1)(c): “Family and maternity care service has as its purpose […] the protection […] of the product of conception.”
Law February 19, 2004, no. 40, art. 1: the “[…] present law, which ensures the rights of all stakeholders, including the conceived […]”.
Gasparri an alien?, a madman who prodigiously assaults the acquired freedom of women to kill the innocent and defenseless creature they are carrying?