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WOW2: October 2023 Women Trailblazers and Activists – 10-8 thru 10-15 [1]

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Date: 2023-10-14  

October 8, 2020

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The Italian women’s group

Differenza Donna filed a complaint with

prosecutors in Rome

on behalf of over 100 women, to investigate who is behind the burial of foetuses in graves marked with the names of their mothers in a Roman cemetery, saying that this violates the women’s human rights and privacy. One woman, after reading about the so-called “fields of angels” in local newspapers, discovered a plot with a wooden cross bearing her name and the date on which the foetus was buried at Prima Porta cemetery, and posted her story on Facebook. Over 100 women have since come together for a potential class action suit in a scandal that also reignited debate in Italy over the difficulties women face in obtaining safe abortions despite the procedure’s legalization in 1978.

Seven out of 10 doctors in Italy refuse to terminate pregnancies for “moral reasons.”

Francesca, age 36, discovered a plot with her name on it containing her unborn daughter’s remains. She ended the pregnancy at six months after being told the foetus was malformed and unlikely to survive the full term. It took 10 days before a hospital agreed to carry out the procedure in September 2019. The date on the grave was in December 2019, three months after the abortion. She, and all the other women, never consented to a burial. In Italy, the foetuses of pregnancies terminated after three months in hospitals can be buried, but only with the mother’s permission. “After the immense pain of losing my daughter, to discover this beastly act was awful,” Francesca, who asked her surname not be published by newspapers. “I repeatedly asked the hospital what happened to the foetus and they made me believe it had been thrown away. So where was it for three months? Then for it to be buried with the symbol of a cross, which I don’t adhere to, and with my name on it – it felt like a punishment.”

Rome’s San Camillo hospital, where the woman who first exposed the discovery had an abortion, has denied responsibility, saying that the remains of foetuses were identified with the mother’s name only for the purposes of drafting transport and burial permits. These details were given to Ama, the public services firm that manages Rome’s cemeteries, but Ama also denied responsibility, saying it carries out burials following the health authority’s instructions.

Livia Turco, a former health minister, believes anti-abortion groups are behind exposing the mother’s names on the graves. The burials are permitted because of a law updated in 1990 from one that was created over 50 years earlier by Benito Mussolini’s fascist regime. Anti-abortion, Catholic, and far-right groups have for years pushed for creation of “fields of angels.”

Women can access abortions at just five hospitals in Rome and none in the wider Lazio region, due to lack of medical personnel who will perform them.

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