The lamb, the zygote and Pasolini

by Marco Pannella

(01.02.75)

Rome, Saint Peter's square, 1967

ABSTRACT: In the midst of a campaign to depenalize abortion, Marco Pannella specifies the goals of the initiative and his beliefs. Abortion cannot and must not be a means of contraception. For years the Radicals alone demonstrated in favour of the contraceptive pill and against abortion. Today the Radicals are not engaged in the campaign for the depenalization of abortion out of "realpolitik", as Pasolini argues. They are fighting against precisely that "realpolitik" of all political forces, which allow and tolerate clandestine abortion to be the only means of massive birth control, who allow the infamous speculation of the "golden spoons" on the life of women. The Radicals are interested only in protecting the victim and disarming those who want to slaughter her. The choice is presently between defending the life of a person, a living and present person, and that of a zygote.
(L'Espresso - February 1975; from "Marco Pannella - Works and speeches - 1959-1980", Gammalibri, January 1982)

"And when euthanasia"?, I was asked in a recent debate on abortion. I will deceive lurking enemies and impatient friends, but I am against it. No one has the right to decide the death of another person provided there is a fraction, or the hope of a fraction, of will and consciousness in the person who suffers and makes others suffer. To manage one's own body in absolute freedom and responsibility is the invariable destiny of the individual, it is a forced choice more than a claim and a right of each one of us. No law, on the other hand, will ever prevent suicide. At the most, the poor suicidal can be made to smash himself horribly under a car or to jump out of the window or to make an entire building explode with gas, whereas the rich person will always be capable of inflicting himself a serene and painless death without endangering, if he does not wish to, the life of other people.
In the same way, no law will ever prevent, as such, the voluntary interruption of maternity. Pasolini is wrong when he thinks that we want to depenalize it out of "realpolitik". For over ten years we have been the only ones, together with Gigi De Marchi, to fight for a free and responsible sexuality, for sexual information, for birth control, for a policy of demographic responsibilization. We continue to do so. We used to go to Saint Peter's Square with banners reading: "yes to the pill, no to abortions".

We have now asked a woman, mother of eight children, to come with us to the Court of Cassation, to sign a request to summon the referendum. For reasons of opportunity (and not opportunism) which I do not approve of but which I respect, she did not come. We wanted, in such a way, to underline the fact that we are fiercely contrary to mistaking the urgent and necessary battle for birth control with that for the depenalization of abortion. We are in favour of a free and responsible maternity, and a free and responsible use of our body; and not just one way. We pledge to convince all people to think well before procreating.
But we are already here and mobilized in order for society to fully protect, as it protects other choices, even the choice to having many children, though we basically disapprove of it. Provided it is, precisely, a choice and not a punishment, for the mother at any rate (if not for the children who, bearing no fault, will then come).
It is this Christian-Democrat regime, this capitalist regime which turns mass clandestine abortion into the ultimate demographic weapon (apart from the ejection of the foetus or the embryo, clandestine abortion involves an extremely high rate of sterility, and a considerable rate of mortality; "tax-free" profits amounting to almost one thousand billion lire each year); this is the "realpolitik".
As for us, we defend the victims, while preparing to disarm the mighty ones who massacre them. Then we will discuss. The current clerical-fascist law does not dissuade but on the contrary induces to have abortions, because it deprives society and women and everyone from the possibility of human dialogue, of mutual attempt to give advice and conviction which are the essential nourishment of our concrete, historical morality, of different choices, of possible dissuasions; terrorism and violence will never contribute to anything but death, not life.
I will also tell Pasolini, this profoundly good man and comrade, that there is more still on which he must ask himself if he can and must absolve us from; I confess him that every day life requests me to face problems of conscience which are more serious than that of granting the right for women to interrupt, in a hospital instead of on a kitchen table, the development of the genetic code, the biological project of a zygote, that is, of an ovule, fecundated days or weeks before. For example, the problem of eating and living, while being aware that 80% of the children born in entire regions of the earth and this year alone have been born in the single, ineluctable perspective of suffering horribly and dying murdered by starvation and disease, in the next few weeks, and already while I'm writing. Also thanks to the Humanae Vitae (1). But there are more serious things still. Pasolini wrote about the disappearance, the "genocide", of glow-worms. I'm not being ironical. Will he believe me if I say that one night, many years ago, while in love, I talked about the disappeared glow-worms, like a fairy-tale, to the person who was with me? I am among those who understood, therefore, his article on the Corriere della Sera (2). But Pasolini will understand me, when I say that if I had to choose between saving a living, tender, bleating lamb, with his eyes and his bleating, and save a casual and unwanted zygote, and if I were to do it as a homage and in respect of life, it is that "creature of the Lord" that I would probably save? And yet tomorrow I will be eating roast lamb. "Agnus Dei tollis
peccata mundi...". This is life: it is in tragedy that its and our nobility are manifested. To choose between pains: often we can do no more than this, to honour it and choose goodness and happiness.

Gianfranco Spadaccia (3) and Adele Faccio (4) are still in jail. We have resumed, together with the CISA (5), the MLD (6) and the Radical Party, performing clinical abortions and preventing the barbarian regime abortions. We urgently need honest gynaecologists to assume their responsibilities and to effectively serve life and not death. We ask them to write to us, to commit themselves, not to leave us alone. The Radicals and the feminists of the MLD are organizing for the middle of March a workshop open to physicians to learn how to perform the "Karman method": and Karman himself will conduct the course.
But it will be a useless sacrifice if the Italy of the May 13 victory will not mobilize itself, will not organize itself immediately, spontaneously, from the very basis, to support this campaign for the referendum, this great campaign of social and political liberation. Groups, sections, members of Parliament, single citizens, unions, parties and movements, which should remember that in the near and not so near future we will reap but that which we will have been capable of providing and sowing now. Their commitment and their concrete adhesions are urgently needed.

Translator's notes

(1) Papal Encyclical
(2) Italian daily newspaper
(3) Radical activist
(4) Radical activist
(5) Italian Centre for Sterilization and Abortion
(6) Italian Womens' liberation movement