Rorate Caeli

An abortionist, President of Italy?

Who would have thought it? Politics in the nation of the papacy is now so warped they are seriously considering electing their most radical politician (literally, she is a member of the "Italian Radical Party") and amateur abortionist President of the Italian Republic.

How did Emma Bonino act as an abortionist? She proudly spoke about it in an interview to Italian magazine Oggi in 1975:

"With a bicycle pump, a plastic dilator and a vessel inside which the vacuum is made, and in which the contents of the uterus are emptied. I use a jar that used to hold a kilo of jam. Women don't care that I don't use a vessel purchased at a medical store, it's rather a good reason for some laughs."

Ha ha, hilarious! The Oggi article even included a bizarre picture of Bonino supposedly performing an abortion (widely available online, we cannot reproduce it here). She entered politics in the same year when, after founding the Center for Information on Sterilization and Abortion, she was indicted for the crime. She entered Parliament the following year, and was the key player in the liberation of abortion in Italy in 1978,  the nadir of true Catholic influence in Italian politics - unsurprisingly, under Paul VI.

Gazzetta del Sud reports (repeating numerous original Italian sources):

Support swells for Bonino to be Italian president

Rome, April 4 - Support appears to be swelling for former European commissioner Emma Bonino to become Italy's first woman president. Italian President Giorgio Napolitano's seven-year term ends on May 15 and parties are wrangling about a successor after February's inconclusive general election. But Bonino, a leading member of the small Radical party that promotes economic and social liberalism and champions human-rights issues, has won support from figures on both the left and right of Italy's political spectrum. "I'd very much like Emma Bonino to be president, I'd feel protected by a woman like her, even though some of her positions are distant from mine," former equal opportunities minister Mara Carfagna, an MP for ex-premier Silvio Berlusconi's People of Freedom (PdL) party, told Sky television. "It would be a great symbol of change".

In great measure due to the instability of Italian politics, the President of the Republic is not at all a figurehead, but rather a very powerful political figure in that country. In the greatest demographic and moral crisis in its history, an abortionist president in the Quirinal Palace is just what that noble nation does not need. Will the Church speak up? Do not hold your breath...