An untenable principle

“This proposal is founded on a mistaken premise, based in turn on an untenable principle: that a right to abortion exists, whereas the violation of the right to life of another human being cannot be called the exercise of a right”, declares Maria Luisa Di Pietro, co-president of the Italian association “Scienza & Vita”/Science & Life (which is committed to defending life from conception to natural death) and professor of bioethics at the Catholic University of the Sacred Heart. Di Pietro made the point in a briefing to SirEurope, commenting on the report of the Commission of Equal Opportunities of the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe (PACE), published on 18 March and due to be debated at the plenary of PACE in Strasbourg from 14 to 18 April. The document invites the member states of the Council of Europe that have not yet done so – Andorra, Ireland, Malta and Poland – to de-penalise abortion. But it also emphasises that even in those countries in which abortion is legal, “conditions are not always such as to guarantee women of the effective exercise of this right”. The various obstacles indicated by the report include “the lack of doctors willing to practice the interruption of pregnancy, the repeated and obligatory medical consultations, the moratorium prescribed for reflection and the long waiting times. “Abortion, however, is never a right – insists Di Pietro -: the formulation itself of many European laws on the matter is based not on a presumed right of abortion, but on a so-called ‘state of necessity’. These laws, though they authorise the voluntary interruption of pregnancy, do not recognize this practice as a woman’s right”. According to Di Pietro, the report of the Equal Opportunities Commission represents “an ill-advised attempt to exert pressure by claiming the exercise of a ‘right’ that is often a misguided request for independence and self-determination on the part of the woman, or a condition that conceals loneliness and poverty of various types. We know in fact – she explains – that most of these requests come from those in conditions of economic difficulty or who feel under pressure from a society that does not accept the disabled or those who suffer from some pathology”. Often, in short, “a woman feels herself almost conditioned to make certain choices which, precisely because they are not free, cannot in fact be called such”. “Rather than think of legitimising all this and of imposing it even in those States in which no law on the matter has yet been enacted”, we ought instead – says the expert – to “pose ourselves a question on the main problem, namely, why does a woman have recourse to abortion, and why is nothing done to reduce to the maximum this tragedy by placing ever more women in conditions that would enable them to live to the full their own aspiration to maternity and, especially, by permitting so many human beings in their embryonic phase to continue their growth. On the conscientious objection of doctors, cited in the document as an “obstacle” to the exercise of the right to abortion, Di Pietro replies: “It’s an important signal; a large part of the medical class has finally realized it has in its own blood and in the DNA of its profession the vocation to place itself at the service of life and health. This is a positive signal. Conscientious objection, as a right recognized by law, is a form of freedom that cannot be violated or undermined”. More generally, concludes the expert, “both in Italy and in Europe, there is growing recognition among those in the medical profession and among the public at large of the need to defend life in all its phases, which goes in quite the opposite direction than the Strasbourg document. It seems to me that what some are trying to impose in many European institutions is not what the majority of people feel, but the ideology of a minority”.