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ROME, April 15, 2014 (LifeSiteNews.com) – Italy’s Constitutional Court ruled Friday that the country’s prohibition against using donor-derived sperm and ova for in vitro fertilization is unconstitutional.

Passed in 2004 as an amendment to the country’s law on artificial procreation, known as Law 40, the ban withstood a referendum attempt in 2005 due to low voter turnout.

When the law was first passed, it was one of the strongest of its kind in the world in protecting embryos from sale or experimentation.

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But Health Minister Beatrice Lorenzin of the New Centre Right Party says the ruling has effectively “gutted” the law.

The law still restricts IVF treatments to married couples and bans the use of existing embryos in genetic research. The Constitutional Court is expected to issue a ruling on the question of pre-implantation genetic diagnosis or genetic “screening,” and the use of embryos for experimentation on June 18. 

This is the latest in a string of court decisions overturning various prohibitions and restrictions of the artificial procreation law.

Lorenzin said Parliament will have to debate how to proceed, but Deputy Eugenia Roccella of the same party said to expect a new bill “in the next few days.” Roccella said a recent case at Sandro Pertini Hospital was probably one of “medical malpractice in the context of assisted fertilization.”

A new bill would consider how best to allow “heterologous” techniques, that is those that use material from persons other than the prospective parents. She cautioned that Law 40 had imposed rules “to protect all parties involved” including the children conceived through artificial means.

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With its “basic criterion that infertile couples should be put under the same conditions as those fertile, the law allowed only what happens in natural conception within a breeding pair.”

When the law was being formulated, Roccella added, “We transposed European directives adapting them to our legislation on assisted reproduction, establishing rules to avoid errors like these.” She said that the incident was due to “a failure to apply the rules on traceability of biological materials.”

Roccella, who has also opposed “surrogate mothers,” warned that if incidents like this occur under the existing rules restricting the creation of embryos to homologous procedures, “with the introduction of the risk of heterologous [techniques] similar errors can only increase.” She said any attempt to legalize heterologous procedures “needs specific and certain rules.”

Law 40, as it was originally passed, prohibited pre-implantation genetic diagnosis, cloning and any experimentation on existing embryos, as well as storing them frozen. It was passed by the socially conservative government of Silvio Berlusconi, but was immediately opposed by the left.

Since the failed referendum in 2005 attempts have been constant to chip away at its prohibitions and restrictions in various civil cases. In 2012, the European Court of Human Rights ruled that prohibiting genetic screening of in vitro embryos “violates the right to respect for private and family life” guaranteed by Article 8 of the European Convention on Human Rights.

That ruling specifically noted the “incoherence” of the Italian law that restricted the “screening” of embryos – which involves destroying those rejected for suspected genetic imperfections – but allowed abortion. In 2008, the outgoing leftist coalition government allowed pre-implantation genetic diagnosis as one of its last acts in power, but the application of the change was delayed.  

The law had originally also banned fertilizing more than three ova in IVF procedures, and required that all three had to be implanted, but these provisions were overturned by courts in 2008 and 2009.