Critical suggestions regarding article 1 (first paragraph) of the 194/1978 Italian Act

Abstract

Article 1, first paragraph, of the 194/1978 Italian Act, the law on abortion, establishes, although at first it seems to want to protect life, that in certain cases abortion is allowed.

The social problem which should be resolved as soon as possible is that of establishing whether the legal asset “life” (which has constitutional importance) should be concretely protected and guaranteed by the present legislation which has been in force for the last sixteen years without ever having undergone any significative modifications in favour of the life of the infant who is to be born. In order to study these problems further, the concept of human life and its actual beginning should be defined with methodologies which are close to scientific certainty. According to the most authoritative scholars of the subject, the concept of individual life is an undifferentiated “unicum” whose actual biological beginning starts from the moment of fertilization, when the spermatozoo enters the egg cell.

Considering that human life is a unitarian concept and that the criminal law for elaborating the concept of life can not generate conventional or axiomatic parameters, it is clear that the asset “life” deserves legal protection which is in line with the evolution of science.

From a through analysis of article 1 of the Act, which in the first paragraph states that human life should be protected from its beginning, one can conclude that this article could be constitutionally illegitimate because it is not explicit enough, since the application of the article actually contradicts that first paragraph.