Michele on the Road: on Travel, Photography and Life

Last Sunday and Monday, in Italy, we had to vote on a poll to turn down parts of a stupid law on artificial insemination.
For the poll to be valid, at least 50% of those who can vote should have voted, unfortunately only about 25% voted.

The poll was made of 4 parts addressing 4 parts of the law:

1. On Research: to allow the use of human embryos to find cure for degenerative diseases such as Parkinson and Alzheimer.
2. On Women Health: at the moment, a maximum of 3 ova can be fertilized and they all have to be implanted. This one was to allow doctors to decide how many embryos should be implanted based on each woman characteristics.
3. On Women Health: with the current law when a woman decide to be artificially inseminated and her ova have been fertilized, she can’t change her mind: she has to go through it all, but then, of course, she’ll be able to abort — isn’t this nonsense?
4. Donor Insemination: as of today, infertile couples can’t have children.

And here’s what I think about each point:

1. I’m totally for research. I mean, if we can find a cure to those diseases by using embryos, why not?
   We test our products on animals and almost nobody cares about this, so I think doing a few tests on human embryos is not that bad.
   And well, I don’t really think of an embryo as a real human being: is an egg a chicken?
2. Each woman is different from another, so each woman being artificially inseminated needs to be treated as her own characteristics suggests.
   If she’s old, she might need more than 3 embryos to be implanted. If she’s young a couple should suffice.
3. This one doesn’t need a comment, it comments itself: you can’t change your mind, but once you’ve been inseminated you can abort? So stupid!
4. At first, I wasn’t sure how to vote on this one, because if you can’t have a child, you can always adopt one. There are so many children that need a family. And also, the World is quickly becoming overcrowded.
   But then I thought I can’t decide for others: if a couple can’t have children and doesn’t want to adopt a child, they should be able to have a child anyway. And there are couples that might not be able to adopt a child, too.

Anyway, as I said the poll wasn’t valid because not enough citizens voted, so we’ll have to live with that stupid law for some more time.
And as always happens in Italy, many people voted because of their religion and not because of their own moral.