“Our body cannot be touched, we defend it with fighting” . With this cry the activists of Non Una Di Meno Siena and other Siena collectives (such as Collettiva Frog and Link Siena) took to the streets to respond to the attack carried out by the government on counseling centers and the right to abortion. “The government attacks our bodies and our right to self-determination with the vote, in favor of the chamber, on the amendment to the PNRR which would allow anti-abortion associations to enter public clinics – say the activists –. We want to prevent misogynistic anti-abortionists from entering our clinics. We take to the streets to defend acquired rights that are being questioned and to demand new ones.”
“Beyond the 194 – declares Albalisa Sampieri -, the limits of this law have always been evident, just think of the inclusion of conscientious objection – he explains -, if on the one hand the result of establishing the rules was achieved by which abortion would no longer be a crime, those same rules expressed the heavy nature of state intervention and accentuated the patriarchal representation of “woman=mother”, a law mirroring a cultural attitude that conveyed the role of mother as “absolutely positive”. The entire text of the law is based on the ethical valorization, not even too hidden, of the woman who decides to continue the pregnancy, to the detriment of the image of the woman who, in a self-determined way, simply says “I don’t want a child”. For these reasons, various feminist groups opposed the law, because they were not asking for a law on abortion, but they were demanding the freedom to have an abortion and, even before that, they were demanding free sexuality. And today? – Sampieri asks himself. We must say that the accusation made against us of contributing to low demographic growth must be rejected by the sender, saying that if Italy and Europe are ageing, it is mainly the effect of the walls that are rising, of the xenophobic and racist entrenchment, of immigration policies obsessed with security, military policies regardless of the life that is born and grows across the border. Secondly, the issue of declining fertility cannot be addressed as if the desire for motherhood were a certain, taken-for-granted fact. Then there is the logic and fragility of relations between the sexes and there is, above all, the freedom not to have children, which in feminism we have gained as a freedom of no lower degree than that of having them. The need therefore becomes urgent to reunify that awareness that we certainly had when we stated that we would not accept any law on our body and against this umpteenth attack on our freedom and our happiness, we must strongly reiterate that every time you try to control the our bodies,
our lives as a consequence, we will find new spaces, new words and new practices.
We will continue to abort together, even illegally, if and when you make it necessary. We will continue to exchange practices, advice, suggestions, help, in a sharing of sisterhood and knowledge that for too long has been considered superfluous due to a right that you have told us is unshakable. We will continue to create networks of mutualism from below that break down every obstacle you put in our way and we will do so without leaving any subjectivity alone. We will continue to talk about our abortions, reclaiming a narrative that you have always tried to take away from us, thus imposing on us an obligatory sense of guilt and shame that we dismantle with the power of our bodies that self-determine and shout it in the square, they talk about it at the end of the supermarket, they laugh about it in front of churches. Because you can make and change the laws, but we dictate the rules on our bodies.”
