AGI – The second day of the G7 summit includes the unprecedented participation of Pope Francis, the first pontiff to take part in this event. On the first day of the G7, a case on abortion broke out which provoked a harsh stance from the Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni towards the French president Emmanuel Macron. What happened? The word ‘abortion’ it should be included in the final declaration of the summit, France proposed last night in the last discussion between the delegations for the drafting of the document. The Italian presidency decides that the reference to this issue contained in the Hiroshima G7 declaration is sufficient, President Emmanuel Macron says he is “regretted” and Meloni responds with a hard face by urging the occupant of the Elysée not to “campaign using an forum as valuable as the G7”.
The chronicle of the facts
In the early afternoon, in light of the first articles that appeared, an Italian source, conversing with some journalists in Borgo Egnazia, stated that the controversy regarding the lack of presence of the word ‘abortion’ in the draft of the final declaration “is whipped cream”. And he adds: “I suspect that there was electoral or post-electoral exploitation by someone who perhaps wanted to insert a disturbing element into a G7 that is doing very well.” Another hypothesis, continued the same source, is that “you journalists, when you don’t have the substance, try to write something. Having said that, it’s really a story that’s being fabricated without substantial reasons, because in the text that will obviously be published there is no step backwards compared to Hiroshima and nothing has been taken away from the commitments made by the G7 leaders in Japan. So much so that in tomorrow’s declaration there is an explicit reference, in a paragraph, to the commitments undertaken in Hiroshima and which are reconfirmed. There is no word abortion because it is in the commitments that are referred to. Nothing was taken away.”
“This fabrication – continued the source – arises from the fact that in the middle of the night that paragraph was read and there was a proposal to modify those commitments by going much further. Italy has never said: we don’t want go further. We simply said that we would have liked a balanced text that also covered other topics. At that point – it was 3 in the morning – we said: let’s confirm the Hiroshima commitments. And that’s that”.
“In short – underlined the source -, we said that if there is something to add we too have to add other things, to balance the text. At that point everyone said: it’s 3 in the morning, let’s go to sleep”. The Italian source, due to his “professional ethics”, did not want to reveal the positions taken by the individual delegations but underlined: “We have suffered an injustice but we will not do it to others“.
It was France that asked to include the word ‘abortion’ in the document, as clearly emerges from the response given to journalists by President Emmanuel Macron after the statements of the Italian source. “France – said the resident of the Elysée – has integrated into its Constitution the right of women to abortion, the freedom to dispose of their own bodies. These are not the same sensitivities that exist today in your country. I regret it “. Following these words, when questioned by journalists, Meloni stated: “The controversy over the presence or absence of the word abortion in the conclusions is totally specious. The conclusions of Borgo Egnazia recall those of Hiroshimain which we already approved last year the need to guarantee that abortion is ‘safe and legal’.
It is an established fact and no one has ever asked to take steps back on this. The conclusions, in fact, if they do not introduce new arguments, in order not to be unnecessarily repetitive, simply recall what has already been declared in previous summits. There is no reason to argue about issues that we have already agreed on for some time. And I believe it is profoundly wrong, in difficult times like these, to campaign using a precious forum like the G7.”
