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 worried 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 god) even though they are mostly unable even to convince their own followers.

We say NO, through a practice of re-appropriation 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!

FdCA Workgroup on Gender Issues
12th December 2003