Italy’s Parliament Gets Bill Recognizing Rights of Unborn Children on Abortion
by Steven Ertelt
LifeNews.com Editor
December 8, 2009
Rome, Italy (LifeNews.com) — A member of the Italian parliament has introduced legislation that would recognize the rights of unborn children. The measure, sponsored by Carlo Casini, president of the Pro-Life Movement and Member of the European Parliament, would recognize that unborn children have rights beginning at conception.
Casini says his bill has the backing of leaders of the Italian Parliament, including Maurizio Gasparri, Gaetano Quagliarello and Laura Bianconi.
A Zenit report indicates he filed the bill last Thursday and, during a press conference on it, explained that it is not an attempt to rewrite Italy’s abortion law.
Instead, he said it would go along with the law by stopping the distortion of it "to the point of denying the one conceived the dignity of person and of using abortion as a contraceptive, two conditions that the law rejects."
Casini told Zenit the bill spells "progress in the juridical culture" and that recognizing the rights of unborn children "is a more solid and lasting support for the rights of everyone."
Casini said the key is in how abortion law is interpreted and he said Spain and Poland have similar abortion laws, but Spain interprets its law liberally to allow 120,000 abortions annually while Poland has just 313 each year.
"The essential difference lies in that Polish law refers to the conceived in the first point as a person, whereas for a certain Spanish culture, the conceived is ‘something,’ a mass of cells that has no rights," he said, according to Zenit.
Bianconi has said the bill is an attempt to "move the whole debate" under the auspices of the 1959 Declaration of the Rights of the Child.
"A defense of childhood, which must be both before as well as after birth, must provide recognition of human life until its birth," she said.
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