Volunteers inside public health facilities in the Aosta Valley would force “listening to the fetal heartbeat” on women intending to have an abortion, also promising “economic support or consumer goods”. All “with the specific intent of dissuading them” from their choice.
The complaint from the association that manages the anti-violence center in Aosta comes a few days after the Senate gave the go-ahead to the provision that allows Pro-Lifers to fully enter the organization of the Consultors.
Associations and oppositions, starting with the Green Alliance and the Left, immediately went on the attack. The Minister for the Family, Eugenia Roccella, is also against listening to the fetal heartbeat: “It is certainly not a way to help difficult maternities”. The cases would be “three or four”, but neither the Valle d’Aosta Region nor the only local health company have had any confirmation. The Movement for Life also declares that it does not carry out activities in public health centers in the Aosta Valley.
The abortion rate in the small Alpine region is under five cases per 1,000 women aged between 15 and 49, a lower number than the other regions of the North-West according to updated ministerial data referring to 2021. “Given that the Local Health Authority says that there have been no reports so are our women telling lies?”: Anna Ventriglia, the president of the Aosta Women’s Center against Violence association, does not want to go into detail. “It’s not up to me to say who made these requests, I made this report, plus we are protected by the anonymity and confidentiality of the women.” But now the stone has been thrown.
“Making a woman who is going to have an abortion feel the heartbeat of her unborn child” according to Minister Roccella “is something that should not be done, but it was certainly not a volunteer who did this because to make the heartbeat heard you need an ultrasound and a gynecologist, so it is a practice that evidently was done by some gynecologist and therefore it is right that in case this bad medical practice emerges in the press”. For Alessandra Kustermann, president of Svs Donna helps women Onlus, gynecologist and first female head doctor of the Mangiagalli clinic in Milan, it would be “cruelty, something that remains in a woman’s head for years, private violence”, as well as a prohibited practice ” from art. 2 of 194 which essentially says, you can talk to the woman about alternative solutions but not commit cruel violence”.
A “very serious” complaint according to the group leader of the Green and Left Alliance in the Chamber, Luana Zanella: “I believe that no one can deny that all this is also the result of the climate desired by this Government which attacked the 194 frontally”.
Over the Tiber, Cardinal Secretary of State Pietro Parolin, in an interview with Avvenire of which a preview was released, declares: “How can we think that abortion is a right? That it ensures a future for our society? I’m sad and I really don’t I understand”.
The president of Telefono Rosa, Maria Gabriella Carnieri Moscatelli, speaks of episodes “in contrast with democratic principles”: “This is not democracy but an abominable psychological pressure”. Recalling the “cultural change” invoked by the “Anti-violence centers that come from feminism”, Antonella Veltri, president of DiRe – Women on the Net against violence, underlines that “today we are grappling with the institutional violence exercised on women’s choice of conscious motherhood, through unacceptable patriarchal actions.”
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