The political and social atmosphere surrounding the referendum on medically assisted childbirth (Law 40/2004), due to be held in Italy in 12-13 June, is becoming increasingly charged in the country. In an editorial with the title “Plan to speak on behalf of women” on the front page of the Italian Catholic daily Avvenire (26/05), Marina Corradi writes: “ Women have always been capable of rejecting a child they did not want, of refusing to accept it. But here it is a question that goes far beyond that, something that has never happened in the history of man: accepting that the embryo, the living origin of a human being, be turned into a thing, that it be used to derive what’s necessary from it to treat others, that it be turned into a drug”. What particularly disturbs the journalist is the “test-tube philosophy“, the quest for the “ stronger child, the most successful. Selecting is the antithesis of accepting what women have done for millennia with all their children, healthy and sick alike, in a silent epic that has built history. They have given birth, brought up, cared for and loved their children, the brilliant and the stupid, the beautiful and the unhappy, even the hunchbacked and the deformed, with extraordinary tenacity and generosity, all of them, without choosing, without selecting which is the opposite of loving“. The opening of the French Catholic daily La Croix of 25/05 is dedicated to the referendum of 29 May, when French electors will be called to vote yes or no to the European Constitution. In his opening editorial, Dominique Quinio makes a series of observations on the opinions registered in the Catholic electorate. “ In extreme synthesis writes Quinio the ‘no’ of Christians is based on two reasons: one part of the electorate has not approved the failure to cite the Christian roots of Europe in the draft Constitution and interprets this decision as a threat to families and to life”. “Another part of Christians is tempted to vote ‘no’ because it fears the risks of an unbridled liberalism and fears that it is the weakest citizens who will have to pay the price for it“. One thing however is certain: “ the age in which believers were given indications about how to vote has ended… Each citizen has the task of informing himself and expressing his vote in conscience“, having as his sole concern “ the common good of all Europeans“. The fall of the coalition government in northern Rhineland-Westphalia and Schröder’s decision to call early elections are at the centre of comments in the German press. “ The SPD is now fighting alone ‘against all the other competitors’, said the Chancellor, so also against the Greens obviously not with all possible violence“, says a leader in the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung (25/5). “ And there’s not even any need for it, seeing that the impetus of Schröder’s decision to call new elections has itself stuck a serious blow at the Greens“, whose leader, Foreign Minister Fischer, no longer has a blameless record, due to the scandal of the ‘easy’ visas handed out to thousands of Ukrainians. On Schröder’s decision Stephan Hebel comments as follows in the Frankfurter Rundschau: “ Schröder under pressure but also with some courage has smoothed the way for the ‘choice of what direction to take’. And to take this direction he will need still more courage. If in doing so, the SPD and the Greens fall into the strategic trap of forgetting the clear direction, September will only bring the loss of the mandate of those held responsible for the disaster because they are in government leading the majority motivated by frustration to support a little-loved alternative that is not really an alternative”. And on the opposition, Herbert Kremp comments in Die Welt: “ The CDU must now respond to the question whether it is able to exploit the opportunity handed to it“. “What the Church thinks of cloning may only make medicine regress”: that’s the view of the Nobel Prize-Winner for Medicine in 1962 James Watson, interviewed by the Spanish daily El Paìs (24/5). Watson is the discoverer of DNA, the “secret of life” and one “of the fathers of molecular biology”. In his view “the position of the Church on a scientific breakthrough like cloning is a total error” that may lead “to a regression of medicine in Europe and in the USA”. “We don’t know whether cloning will work, but we must try”, says Watson. “It’s difficult to find a good general argument against the idea of making better human beings. Of course, now we have a very good one: the fact that we don’t know how to do so. All we have so far been able to do is avoid children being born with horrible infirmities”.———————————————————————————————————– Sir Europa (English) N.ro assoluto : 1392 N.ro relativo : 41 Data pubblicazione : 27/05/05
