The crusade of pro-life groups against abortion and LGBT + rights

The pro-life network has been active in Italy for years, but few knew it existed. Almost until the “World Congress of Families” in Verona in 2019. Instead, the galaxy of ultra-Catholic and Right-wing associations has a deep-rooted, albeit recent, history, from “Pro Vita e Famiglia” to “Let’s defend our children”, from “Citizen go” to “La Manif pour tous” which today represent the ideological reference of the new Speaker of the Chamber, the Northern League Lorenzo Fontana. There was the Movement for Life, of course, founded in 1980 by Carlo Casini, a Christian Democrat parliamentarian, with the aim of opposing, inside and outside Parliament, the law on abortion that has just been approved. There were (and there are) the “Cavs”, the aid centers for life, a sort of conservative “counselors” created by the Movement that proposed and offered aids to women to carry on with the pregnancy, at the same time implementing a tenacious anti-abortion policy , anti-pharmacological contraception, promoting fetal cemeteries and of course conscientious objection against law 194. A network of integralist Catholicism, however, with a still “traditional” language and very close to ecclesiastical hierarchies.

It is only in 2007 with the first great Family Day organized against the “Dico” (a draft of the law on civil unions of homosexuals) and in defense of the natural family that the pro-life galaxy of American inspiration begins to appear on the scene, with all its iconographic corollary of images of aborted fetuses, crosses, signs of newborns with the words “do not kill me”, baby shoes stained with blood.

A movement then still a minority, because it was instead in 2011 with the first “March for life” organized in Italy, in Desenzano, by the “European Movement Defense Life” and by the “Famiglia Domani” association (march in which Lorenzo Fontana also participates ) that pro-life groups are starting to present themselves as such. They become pro-life, abandon the institutional tones and start, on the American model, their aggressive advertising campaigns against abortion, homosexual unions, books considered “dangerous” for children, ask for the legal status of the embryo, attack the nascent rainbow families, assisted fertilization, euthanasia. In 2012 the entrepreneur Toni Brandian inevitable bow tie around his neck, he founded the “Pro Vita” association in 2013 Jacopo Cogheadvertiser, founded “La manif pour tous Italia”, an emanation of the French association created to boycott (in 2012) the proposed law between people of the same.

Between 2015 and 2016 Massimo Gandolfini, Brescian neurosurgeon, father of seven children all adopted, neocatecumental, organizes in Rome two new Family Days against “gender” and “civil unions”, squares from which his association “Defend our children” will be born. In our country “Citizen go” is also rooted, a branched Spanish ultra-Catholic acronym of the extreme right, which raises generous donations all over the world, whose spokesperson is for some years Filippo Savarese. The same “March for life” becomes an acronym in its own right, whose president is Virginia Coda Nunziantedirector of the Cnr.

Organizations merge and split, but are united by a common, extremist and tenaciously homophobic vision: boycotting abortion, LGBTQ rights and any kind of openness to the non-binary dimension (i.e. man woman) of life and love, what they scornfully call “gender ideology”. On the walls of our elephant-like cities, placards land where the words “I’m alive, don’t kill me” are printed on the bellies of pregnant women, to attack homosexual couples with children. bars, as if it had just been bought, because “two men don’t make a made”. And then bloody women against Ru496, males with the pink ribbon against transsexuality, and the obsession to represent, everywhere, 10/12 week fetuses, that is the period in which the termination of pregnancy in our country is guaranteed by law. .

The then Minister for the Family was a great sponsor at the Congress of Families in Verona Lorenzo Fontana, that the prolife world appears, for the first time in its entirety, showing a consolidated reality. The ideological references are precise: the anti-abortion and armed American ultra-right represented by Donald Trump and his spin doctor Steve Bannon, the Russian Orthodox and homophobic church, the most conservative fringes of the Vatican, the Spanish fundamentalist clergy, the “Ordo Iuris” group, a powerful religious radical organization responsible for the liberticidal laws against abortion, divorce and gay communities in Poland and Hungary. In 2017, Neil Dattasecretary of the European parliamentary forum for sexual and reproductive rights, had denounced the existence of a transnational and conservative working group that had developed a document called the “Agenda Europe”.

A (secret) program, a crusade that aimed to break down, in every state of the union, all laws on divorce, abortion, contraception, homosexual unions, restoring the role of women only as mother and wife. Among the main authors of the program Alexei Komov, which is part of the world congress of families, representative of the ultra-reactionary Russian church, a great friend of “Pro Vita” and of the new president of the Chamber Lorenzo Fontana. Together with Komov he signs “Agenda Europa” Konstantin Malofeevthe oligarch friend of Putin.

The branched galaxy of pro-life then has its own reference sites, from “The new daily compass” to “Enough lies”, from “The subsidiary” to the “Rosario Livatino Study Center”, from “Formiche.net” to “Tempi” .

After having succeeded in the first Conte government to get the Northern League elected Simone Pillon in the Senate, author of the infamous rule on “compulsory two-parenting” in cases of separation (provision filed) to represent the pro-life instances in Parliament he had tried Maria Rachele Ruiu, exponent of “Generazione Famiglia”, “wife and mother”, so she defines herself, proudly against abortion, contraception, homosexual rights, careers alias, Ddl Zan. Given for elected, she was then excluded for the calculation of the remains and remained out of parliament.

So this is the ideological universe, the chastity-extremist, to which a part of the League and the Brothers of Italy refer today. Celebrated in the American film “Unplanned”, the story of the repentance of a nurse who after working in a cynic for abortion, repents and becomes fiercely anti-abortion. With the blessing of that fringe of traditionalist clergy who have never accepted laws like 194, the end of life, or civil unions.