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Italy Likely to Gut Pro-Life Elements of IVF Law by Referendum

ROME, January 14, 2005 (LifeSiteNews.com) – Italy’s constitutional court has ruled that the law regulating in vitro fertilization (IVF) must be put to a referendum to amend those aspects that protect life and the traditional family.

LifeSitenews.com reported January 13th, that Canadian pro-life leaders are alarmed by the increasing dominance of a libertarian mentality in Canadian conservatism that demands that all political questions of morality be decided by referendum. Jim Hughes, National President of Campaign Life Coalition asked, “what if the people choose something immoral?” This fear is now being played out in Italy where one of the world’s strongest laws regulating IVF is under attack by a court-ordered plebiscite demanded by a coalition of radical leftists, anti-clericalists and libertarians.

The coalition, led by the Radical Party of Italy, has pushed to have the law regulating IVF overturned since it was passed a year ago. The law restricts artificial means of reproduction to heterosexual couples, bans egg or sperm donation, restricts the number of ova that can be fertilized, bans the freezing of embryos and restricts experimental research on living embryos. The court order rejected a proposal to overturn the law entirely and instead allows a referendum to overturn the key elements.

Italy’s Radical Party, an extreme left group whose governing principle is undisguised anti-Catholicism and anti-clericalism, collected 500,000 signatures to force the Italian courts to order a referendum on IVF. The party claimed that the way the law, imposed without a popular vote, constituted a “threat to democracy.”

“Now we have the chance to change this disgraceful law in parliament if there is agreement between the various political forces, otherwise via a vote of our citizens,” said Gavino Angius, a Senate member of Italy's main opposition party Democrats of the Left. Angius called the law, “the worst in Europe.”

The Radical Party claims that any objections to IVF are a manifestation of the Catholic Church’s attempt to “condemn… all modern thought and civilization,” and “return the world to the middle ages.” That the Italian court took these charges seriously has alarmed pro-life leaders who frame the argument in terms not of obscure religious prohibitions, but of universal natural moral law and scientific realities.

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