The Religious Consultation
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New York Times, June 14, 2005 Italian Vote
to Ease Fertility Law Fails for Want of Voters
ROME, June 13 - A law that imposes strict rules on assisted fertility will remain on the books, after the failure on Monday of a hard-fought referendum that rubbed into one of Italy's sorest spots: the relationship between church and state. The fight leading up to two days of voting on Sunday and Monday mobilized the nation's political and religious establishments like few others, as the leadership of the Roman Catholic Church - including the new pope, Benedict XVI - urged Italians to boycott the referendum. In the end, the outcome was not even close. Only 26 percent of as many as 50 million eligible Italians voted, meaning that the referendum automatically failed, with the votes uncounted, in its attempt to repeal four crucial sections of a restrictive fertility law passed last year. For the referendum to be valid, 50 percent of eligible voters had to take part. The results would seem an immediate victory for the church and for the young papacy of Benedict, in a Europe where church influence has declined significantly in recent decades. Similar referendums in Italy on divorce and abortion in the 1970's and 80's passed overwhelmingly despite church opposition, and Italians now seem likely to debate whether apathy or a reverse in secularism in the home of the Roman Catholic Church defeated this referendum. "The results of today mean that Italy is maybe more similar to Texas than to Massachusetts," said Rocco Buttiglione, Italy's culture minister and a friend of Pope Benedict. "Italians want a democracy with values - that values human life - and that is why they rejected this referendum." For the church, the results seemed especially important since the referendum concerned issues central to church teachings on values. The fertility law, passed here under church lobbying last year, defines life as beginning at conception and bans most experimentation on human embryos. "I'm struck by the maturity of the Italian people," Cardinal Camillo Ruini, president of the Italian bishops' conference, told reporters, according to Reuters. Cardinal Ruini, a top Vatican official and close aide to Benedict, regularly urged Italians to abstain from the referendum. Conceding a heavy defeat, the political forces that supported the referendum characterized the results as a blow to the walls between church and state. They warned that the church would next set its sights on Italy's abortion law. "There is a problem of the climate, of the atmosphere in this country," Emma Bonino, a leader of the Radical Party who spearheaded the fight for legalized abortion in the early 1980's, told reporters. "It is not secular, and it's very worrying." But some experts cautioned against reading too much into the results, noting that Italy is a particular nation, where church and state are entwined like nowhere else; that a battle over abortion would be much more difficult; that a similar fight seemed unlikely to gain ground elsewhere in Europe. Renato Mannheimer, a pollster at the University of Milan, noted that other referendums in Italy in recent years had also attracted only about 25 percent of voters, calling into question how many stayed away because church leaders urged Italians to abstain. Italians, he said, are growing more and more apathetic. "This is a victory for the church, but Italian politicians should not think it is only the church, because of this apathy," he said. He added that the issues were "too complicated," also causing many people to stay home. The referendum sought to overturn four sections of law: one that granted the same rights to an embryo as to a child; one that banned most experimentation on fetuses; one that allowed couples to create no more than three embryos, all of which must be implanted at one time without genetic testing; and one that banned couples from using eggs or sperm donated by other people. Opponents of the law contend that it has opened a flood of infertile couples seeking treatment at clinics, of varying quality, outside Italy. In recent weeks, the referendum was fought with full force, with each side painting the other in the worst light. Some supporters of the existing law accused opponents of seeking like the Nazis to create a race of perfect humans, because the referendum would have allowed a return to in-vitro screening for genetic defects. Opponents of the law accused the Vatican of invading Italians' private lives directly, and called it an attack on women's rights in particular. They also noted a contradiction between the fertility law and the nation's abortion law that they said opened the door to repealing the right to abortion in Italy: The fertility law grants full rights to a fertilized egg, yet the abortion law allows for a pregnancy to be terminated. The fight knotted up Italy's politics amid early positioning for general elections next year, with its two most prominent politicians - Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi and Romano Prodi, the leader of the center-left - both leaving much ambiguity about their stances. Francesco Rutelli, head of the center-left Daisy Party, angered many of his colleagues by supporting the abstention, even as Gianfranco Fini, the foreign minister and leader of the center-right National Alliance, outraged many of his supporters by saying he would vote to repeal three of the four questions on the referendum. But even amid the polarization, there were voices on both sides that said problems in the law could possibly be worked out in Parliament, rather than in an emotional referendum and expensive advertising campaign. It is unclear whether that is still possible after the bitterness of the last weeks, but supporters of the referendum said they were not yet giving up the fight to change the law. "At least 10 million people voted in favor," Stefania Prestigiacomo, the nation's equal rights minister, who favored the referendum, told reporters. "They were probably the informed ones. We won't give up. We'll continue our battle. Ours was an important battle of conscience that I consider just." Jason Horowitz contributed reporting for this article. << New York Times-- 6/12/05 >>
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