Minister Eugenia Roccella was challenged by a group of students during her speech at the General States of Natality. About fifty young people from all over Italy with the transfeminist movement Aracne displayed signs that read “We decide on our bodies”, launching slogans against the government’s choices regarding counseling centers. At first the minister tried to continue her speech, then she stood up: “I can’t see what’s written, what’s written?”.
Then evidently someone read the signs and at that point, turning to the protesters, she tried to mediate: «Guys, but we agree. Nobody said that someone else decides on women’s bodies, absolutely nobody.” And again: «This is why we are here, because women don’t decide about their own bodies. They don’t decide fully, freely, if they want to have children, we have this problem.” At that point Gigi De Palo, president of the Natality Foundation and moderator of the debate for the occasion, intervened proposing to the minister to have one of the protesters come on stage representing the group of students who were animating the protest.
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The minister accepts and so a student joins her, but decides not to participate in the debate, limiting herself to reading a document on the right to abortion and sexual and emotional education. Roccella tried to reply but from the back of the audience, where the students had gathered, the chorus of “Shame, shame” rose up. And so the minister decided to leave the demonstration. Shortly afterwards she vented on her social media inviting “the freedom runners” (citing Schlein, Scurati, Saviano, Lagioia and Valerio) to express solidarity with her for the “censorship” episode. Then from Vespa to «Five minutes» you explained that the misunderstanding about women’s availability of their body «I believe it arises from the amendment that was made in Parliament, but we have always defended the 194». In the evening, the same people who contested the minister joined the “occupiers” of the Faculty of Political Sciences at La Sapienza in Rome.
It is not the first time that Roccella has been contested. About a year ago the minister was at the Turin Book Fair to present her volume “A radical family” when her speech was interrupted by a group of activists from “Extinction Rebellion” and “Non una di meno” forcing her to leave the stage.
Read also: Tg4, Cerno and censorship in Roccella: “Today’s fascists are those on the left”
For a Roccella who was unable to speak yesterday, there is a Sgarbi who will not speak on Sunday. Yes, because the former undersecretary, now running for the European Parliament, saw the presentation of his latest book on Michelangelo «Stupor and fear» canceled at the Turin Book Fair. The reason? Annalena Benini, the director of the Salon, explained it. «We follow the rules of the electoral campaign. So the political candidates, it also seems to me to be a question of elegance, cannot present the books.” But for the art critic it is an absurd choice: «The Book Fair is in Turin and I am a candidate for the European elections in the South». And again: «I have not missed the Turin appointment for 36 years and I am sure that in many years I will have encountered electoral opportunities». For Sgarbi, the level playing field also extended to non-televised occasions «is a disturbing signal for the recognized opposition between politics and culture, of which I have been a victim in recent times». For the former secretary, it is a mechanism that “enshrines harmful incompatibilities and, through prohibitions and limitations, instead of guaranteeing equal rights, imposes false duties”
