Italy, Vatican to clash on referendum

ROME – Franca longs to have a healthy child, but she carries a blood-disease gene, so she underwent fertility treatment. She had her eggs screened for the condition, then implanted in her womb.

But it didn’t work – and Italian law makes it impossible for her to try again.

Now she sees new hope in a series of referendums today and Monday that will let the nation decide whether to loosen the restrictions on assisted fertility which cleared parliament last year.

However, she and other Italians seeking help to have babies face a formidable opponent in the Vatican, which is waging a fierce campaign to maintain the limitations.

Turnout has to be more than 50 percent, and Italian bishops have urged a voter boycott, with Pope Benedict XVI’s endorsement.

The result will show how much influence the Vatican still wields in a country that is overwhelmingly Catholic but has increasingly strayed from church doctrine, notably by approving divorce and abortion in referendums.

“It is no longer just a vote on artificial insemination. It is also a vote on the church’s power in Italian society,” Sergio Romano, a leading political analyst, wrote in the newspaper Corriere della Sera.

Like many Italians, 40-year-old Franca considers herself Catholic but does not actively practice the faith.

“Maybe we commit a sin, so be it,” she said. “The humble way I see it, I don’t think that trying or hoping to have a child is a sin. It’s just hope.”

She carries the gene of thalassemia, a group of inherited blood diseases. She asked to be identified only by her first name as she weighs her options for further treatment.

The vote could present the pope with the first major challenge in his efforts to overcome religious apathy and even hostility toward the church in an increasingly secular Europe.

Mariangela Carta, 66, expressed support for Benedict’s position as she strolled near St. Peter’s Square. “The church did the right thing. Why should it keep quiet? These are matters that have to do with ethics and morals,” she said.

But the church’s campaign has angered many.

Chiara Lalli, author of a recent book “Liberta Procreativa” – “Freedom of Procreation” – called it a “grotesque attempt to impose its own vision of the world on everybody.”

More than 90 percent of Italy’s 58 million citizens are, at least nominally, Catholics and the church has a well-established influence in politics.

But Italians have defied the church in two referendums considered milestones for Italian society: Divorce was upheld in 1974 and abortion in 1981. The latter vote dealt a blow to the late Pope John Paul II, who campaigned vigorously against abortion.

A recent Associated Press-Ipsos poll found that nearly two-thirds of Italians think religious leaders should not try to influence government decisions. And in random interviews, many denounced the Vatican’s appeal as invasive.

The political world is split over the referendums, with parties generally telling their voters to decide according to their conscience.

The fertility laws ban the freezing of embryos, and limit the number that can be created to three. They forbid sperm or egg donation from outside the couple and prohibit scientific research using embryos.

Italy had become known as “Wild West” of artificial procreation, because it had no laws governing the issue, and many credit the legislation with ending that state of affairs. But the laws also drew strong criticism, with opponents saying they hurt research that could yield cures to diseases and infringe on reproductive freedom.