Perhaps the best thing is to start with a striking joke by Ronald Reagan: “I have noticed that all those who are in favor of abortion are already born.” A bio-logical evidence, from which everyone can derive the moral and political arguments they deem fit. But evidence, as we know, is often the enemy of ideology, and must therefore be disguised, caricatured, expelled from the debate. Otherwise, one cannot explain the pre-cooked chorus of indignation that the left raised over the exhibition “Just EuMan – How a European citizen is born,” set up recently in Strasbourg, at the European Parliament headquarters.
Now, the exhibition was promoted by MEP Paolo Inselvini of Fdi/Ecr and curated by the association Pro Vita&Famiglia, so we understand it was under scrutiny from the start. Yet, it is difficult to remove the minimal certainty that any European citizen, like any human being, was previously a fetus, for a period generally close to nine months. Because this is what the exhibition represents: the journey of the embryo from the moment of fertilization until birth, with an exclusively scientific perspective, supported by photographs and videos, detailed anatomical-physiological descriptions for each stage of development. No legislative proposals or pedagogical sermons, let alone any evocation of any religious code. Pure secularity of the verified fact.
Certainly, among the significant facts reported are that by the tenth week the heart has already beaten more than 10 million times, by the thirteenth the ultrasound records the first smiles, by the twenty-second the fetus reacts to loud noises with the first startles. It is the stubbornness of reality, as the great conservative philosopher Sir Roger Scruton would have said. An ugly thing, which you can defeat in only one way: censoring it. Literally: the group leaders of Socialists, Left and Greens wrote to the president of the European Parliament Roberta Metsola invoking sic et simpliciter the forced closure of the exhibition, that is, methods from an Eastern autocracy.
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But the most zealous in commanded indignation were the MEPs from our broad field. Alessandra Moretti of the Pd shared a video on Instagram directly from the scene of the (psycho)crime, declaring herself “shocked” by an exhibition that “tramples on women’s rights and decades of battles for gender equality” (how the latter is affected by the summary of human fetal development, which is similar for both genders, is a painful mystery of leftism). The honorable former footballer Carolina Morace, Five Star Movement, escalates the rhetoric but shoots it into the stands, calling Just EuMan “a repudiation of European values” (among which life and its intrinsic dignity apparently were not at the very bottom of the list).
But the race of dadaist invective is clearly won, as expected, by Ilaria Salis: “We will not be set back decades by fascists!” If by this expression she means anyone who asks the question about the non-neutral existential and moral nature of the act of abortion (without prejudice to its legality, guaranteed in Italy by law 194 and never evoked by the exhibition), we give her the names of two dangerous fascists. The first is Pier Paolo Pasolini, who even poetically and brutally compared abortion to murder. The second is the tutelary deity of Italian secular and progressive thought: Norberto Bobbio. He defined the “right of the conceived” to be born as “fundamental” compared to the other rights at stake. Ideas on which it is legitimate to disagree, but which in an open society must be allowed to be expressed, and we apologize to the reader for the obviousness. Unless for Salis & Co. the fetus itself is fascist, and we would very much like it to be just a joke.
