Fight for Life and Human Dignity

“Today, ours is a ‘culture of waste,’ while fighting for life means fighting for a culture in which every life is to be respected. Today, when we say this, it seems like we’re speaking ‘Martian.’ Your job is to make this idea land in a selective culture.” Pope Francis addressed these words a few days ago to the sixteen members of the Executive Committee of the European Federation for Life and Human Dignity “One of Us,” whom he received in audience in the hall before his private library.

He did not fail to make a passionate reference to assisted suicide, which is, at times regulated, by law and, at others, hidden by the elderly: “Pardon me! When I talk about these things, I get too inflamed and lose the sense of diplomacy,” said the Pontiff, urging the Federation to continue its work so that every life “is respected and treated with tenderness.”

“The soul of Europe is the recognition of the equal dignity of every human being and the will to be a finally pacified and pacifying continent,” declared Carlo Casini, founder and honorary president of the Federation, who today—40 years after Law 194 entered into force in Italy—signs an article written together with his daughter Marina, president of the Italian Life Movement.

Far from being a “right”,—explains in a comment the jurist, expert in bioethics, Marcello Palmieri—abortion “is and remains a dramatic and extreme choice, allowed by the law because a constitutionally sanctioned juridical right stands in opposition, irremediably, to another right of equal value: the right to life of the conceived person and the pregnant woman’s physical and mental health. This is the true spirit of Law 194 on the voluntary interruption of pregnancy, the ratio—that is, the objective—shining through the whole text and that many jurisprudential pronouncements have confirmed over the years.” Now, while it is increasingly commonplace to accuse the exaggeration of conscientious objectors and the alleged inaccessibility to abortion (but here are dismantled through the official data of the Ministry of Health and with the help of Giovanni Leoni, vice president of the Italian Federation of Doctors), the volunteers of the Life Aid Centers tell how, over the past 40 years, what remains a trauma for women has been trivialized.