Italian–American Narratives of Abortion: Crimes and Rights, Their Differences and Why they Matter

Abstract

This paper aims to underline the importance of language in abortion legislation and to defend the crucial role of criminal law in the protection of human life before birth. It wishes, furthermore, to expose the unsoundness of speaking of abortion as a fundamental right. To this end, the article starts off by examining the Italian abortion legislation, which exemplifies a typical “European approach” to the legal protection of the unborn: from the 1975 Constitutional Court judgement, which exempted some abortions from punishment to the recent “re–criminalization” of unlawful abortions. The second section focuses on American abortion jurisprudence. It underscores its uniqueness, specifically in having declared abortion a constitutional right, and analyzes some of its most troubling consequences, particularly with reference to current feticide crimes. The third section offers a defense of the first approach from both a legal and a philosophical perspective and broadly suggests abandoning the current “abortion–as–a–right–talk” in favor of a more principled use of the criminal law.