With 32 votes in favor, 7 against, 10 abstentions, and a dozen absent MPs, Law 21, the world’s worst abortion law, passed its second reading on the evening of 31 August in San Marino’s Great and General Council.
After the referendum on 26 September 2021, in which the people of San Marino voted in favor of legalizing abortion in the tiny republic, and after the distortion of what was expressed in the referendum question with the creation of a pejorative, a more extreme and radical bill dehumanizing human all life in the womb has thus been passed, reeking of ideology even from miles away and aiming to achieve nothing more than plant yet another flag of “rights” where in fact true and basic rights are being violated.
It violates the right of the unborn child to come into the world; it violates the right to the freedom of conscience of health care personnel who will either not be able to exempt themselves from applying the procedures or will have to leave; and it violates the freedom of parental education by including among its paragraphs one that concerns state sex education to be introduced in schools.
No council group voted against the bill, all councilors were free to vote “according to their conscience,” said a statement from the San Marino Christian Democratic Party.
“Arguments have been dusted off in the parliamentary debate that those who are not too young heard back in the 1970s and early 1980s,” said Antonella Mularoni in a statement to iFamNews. Mularoni is a San Marino lawyer and notary public, former judge of the European Court of Human Rights, Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs and Captain Regent, i.e., Head of State, of San Marino. “It seems that the extraordinary scientific advances of recent decades, including those in the field of neonatology, are important and useful only if they serve the intended goal of pregnancy termination. And with a major absentee: the unborn child, which for pro-abortionists has value only if the mother wishes it, otherwise the woman can do what she wants with it.”
And it is also the mother’s right and the woman’s right, with others, that this law violates by placing as the only constraint an interview with the counseling center which women who decide to have an abortion within 12 weeks of life in the womb have to attend. Indeed, the bill initially included the possibility of choosing a distance call, through a screen, known as “telemedicine” in other countries, instead of an actual visit; fortunately, this provision failed to pass–but only just. Namely, the “[…] amendment wanted to make this access optional, to protect the freedom of choice and privacy.” The law violates women’s rights because, as lawyer Mularoni points out, “we do not feel that we are doing women any good by trying to get them to have abortions as quickly as possible, by avoiding second thoughts, and opposing them being presented with alternatives to abortion. As if abortion were something painless and devoid of consequences, but it is everything except that, even on a psychological level, and in numerous cases for the rest of the woman’s life.”
“Yesterday was a very sad day in San Marino,” she concludes, “for all those who believe that life should always be protected, from the first to the last moment.”