A-Infos (en) Italy: FdCA statement on the new law regarding fertility treatments (it)

[Federazione dei Comunisti Anarchici <internazionale@fdca.it>]

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THIS SIDE OF HEAVEN
Finally the parliament has passed the new law on medical fertility
treatment. A law written by men (parliamentarians) to protect other men
(doctors), to please more men (priests), to reassure yet more men
(those preoccupied with all those freedoms enjoyed by women). Women, in
fact, do not even appear in the law, just hollow bodies for containing
other things. The text of the law talks about procreation, not by men
and women, but by "homologous", "heterologous" "couples". It talks
about "embryos", it sets out "dispositions regarding protection of the
future child" [in Italian, "nascituro", or "birth product" - tr.] or
"embryo protection measures", all this without any reference to living
beings, expropriating and misappropriating women's bodies and ignoring
women's existence as beings in their own right with a right to their
own health.

The only thing which the legislators are woried about is putting a
brake on female desire and remove the power to reproduce from women,
starting with the weakest - whose "illness" is to be infertile - in
order to pass on to all the others.

It is also clear that this law also serves as a means of getting at Law
No.194 regarding abortion on demand, a law which has been an eternal
thorn in the side of fundamentalist Catholicism. Accordingly, women are
now denied these fundamental human and citizenship rights:

* the right to physical and psychological integrity, which is now
delegated to the doctors and judges as the woman no longer has the
power to make decisions regarding the implanting of embryos in her
womb;

* the woman's right to health, which is now delegated, in the name of
the embryo (or "future child" as it is known in ecclesiastical
language), to the doctors who will decide if and how any procedures for
procreation should be carried out;

* the right to citizenship, as women are now denied the freedom to
decide the maternity links with the embryo which now enjoys prematurely
the same recognition of legal status as a born child.

This is a dangerous law as far as the principles is sets out are
concerned. It is also a perfectly useless law, if you consider that in
a Europe without borders there exists legislation on this matter which
is decidedly more reasonable. The only law to be applied will be the
law of the market, which will decide who will be permitted to go abroad
and who will have to make do with the consequences of this law imposed
by the Church on a governing class which is totally lacking a political
conscience and a sense of collectivity and is imbued with individualism
and nepotism.

They have tried to present us with a society in which all men and women
will, from now on, be even more deprived of their personal liberty, as
individuals but also in their relations). But they have not considered
the strength of desire and of relations. It is not sufficient to appeal
to some presumed "naturalness" in order to govern, in this day and age
when society is ever more made up of men and women who choose for
themselves how they relate to each other, despite all those who try to
force us to live according to laws (but in the name of g.o.d) even though
they are mostly unable even to convince their own followers.

We say NO, through a practice of riappropriation of our health, in
order to win back collective spaces and public structures such as
clinics which have become the fiefdom of objecting doctors where
psychological and physical violence is carried out on the weakest
women, the very young and the immigrants.

If women today are quiet, it is because they are stunned by the
arrogance and daring with which both Right and Left speculate on their
bodies, and incredulous, faced as they are with a new mediaeval Dark
Age which lies in store for them.

But the neo-fascist policies being brought into play in the defence of
the family and the birth-rate, the reactionary measures against the
recognition of new forms of non-marital relationships which make up the
fabric of today's society, will not force us back towards patriarchy.
Neither will they set married women against unmarried women, straights
against lesbians, native women against immigrant women: women build
relationships with each other which have always allowed them to get
around bans and proclamations.

It is also up to us to make all this a POLITICAL struggle and to break
the silence!


Workgroup on Gender Issues
12th December 2003

FEDERAZIONE DEI COMUNISTI ANARCHICI
http://www.fdca.it



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