Italy Bars Fertility Aid to Older Women, Gays

Italy has long been known as Europe’s “Wild West” of fertility medicine. This is the country that for years boasted the world’s oldest new mom, and where a leading doctor speaks cavalierly of his plans to clone babies.

No more. With the Vatican nudging it along, the Italian Parliament on Thursday reined in “medically assisted” reproduction by imposing controls that are among the most restrictive on the continent.

The hotly contested law, seen by many as a major setback for reproductive rights and women’s independence, passed by an overwhelming margin thanks to a cross-party alliance of Roman Catholic politicians and the strong endorsement of Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi. His center-right coalition authored the new rules.

Italian women beyond child-bearing age can no longer use artificial insemination or in-vitro fertilization to get pregnant; goodbye to the so-called granny births. Assisted reproduction techniques also will be denied to single parents and gay couples. In addition, the law bans the use of donor sperm or eggs and forbids the screening of embryos for abnormalities, even for couples with a history of genetic disease.

For women of childbearing age, the law limits to three the number of eggs that can be harvested and fertilized at any one time -- and then requires all three to be implanted in the woman’s womb at once. The aspiring mother cannot refuse implantation once the eggs are fertilized. The freezing of spare embryos is also forbidden.

Experts say it usually takes more than a single attempt for a woman to get pregnant through artificial means. With additional eggs frozen and waiting, women can try again without having to start over. But under the new law, Italian women will have to return to the beginning, including often painful and expensive hormone treatments and the harvesting of eggs, each time the procedure fails.

And, the law sets up this conundrum: A woman cannot prevent a deformed embryo from being implanted -- in fact, she can’t determine whether it is healthy beforehand -- but she can abort it after it has affixed itself to the wall of her womb.

Supporters said the law “respects the rights” of the human embryo and promotes the traditional family unit. Opponents said it sacrifices women’s health, could undermine the country’s 1978 law legalizing abortion, and denies sterile couples treatments that are routine elsewhere in Europe and the United States.

“We have here a parliament majority of male chauvinists,” said right-wing lawmaker Alessandra Mussolini. “This would not have passed if, instead of being a law about a woman’s womb, it was a law about a man’s prostate.”

Mussolini, who is the granddaughter of Italy’s World War II Fascist dictator, was joined by women legislators from across the political spectrum in opposing the law. Many in Italy’s medical community and scientists worldwide also condemned the measure, which will also forbid the use of embryos in scientific research.

Supporters of the law say the goal is to protect the embryo and prevent wholesale destruction of fertilized eggs that are not implanted. Authorities are having to figure out now what to do with an estimated 24,000 frozen embryos currently in stock.

Flavio Tredese, a senator from Berlusconi’s Forza Italia (Go Italy) party and a gynecologist who supported the law, acknowledged several flaws but said a bad law was better than no law at all.

“We finally have regulation of a sector that had no rules ... and many aberrations,” he said.

“This law says, ‘Enough!’ to the abuses and recognizes that an embryo is a person and as such must be protected from the point of conception,” said Sen. Elisabetta Alberti Casellati, also from Berlusconi’s party.

But another member of the party, Deputy Foreign Minister Margherita Boniver, decried the “monstrous ... burka law,” alluding to the long, veiled shroud forced on Afghan women and regarded by many as the consummate symbol of the oppression of women.

The restrictions were furiously debated for months, but, by Italian standards, the law passed with unusual speed. Critics said the legislation had the Vatican’s fingerprints all over it and expected the next battle would be over abortion, which is legal in Italy during the first three months of gestation but opposed by the church. By recognizing embryos as living creatures, the new law, opponents worry, could be a first step toward the repeal of abortion rights.

Enacting laws that make it harder to get pregnant might seem an odd development in a country that has the second lowest birth rate in Europe and its oldest population. Officials routinely bemoan the declining vitality of the work force, and the government recently began paying couples 1,000 euros for every child they have after the first.

The church, however, opposes many aspects of fertility medicine because of an unease over artificial interference with reproductive matters and especially because so many embryos are ultimately destroyed.

Even some detractors of the law acknowledged that reproductive science had gotten a bit out of hand.

Italy, after all, gave the world maverick fertility specialist Severino Antinori, who has announced his plans to clone human babies. He also has specialized in helping post-menopausal women get pregnant.

With her husband’s sperm, donated eggs and Antinori’s expertise, Rosanna Della Corte gave birth to a baby boy in 1994 at the age of 62, making history and fueling the ethical debate. She held the record as the oldest woman to give birth until bested by a 65-year-old Indian woman in 2003, according to the Guinness Book of Records.

Efforts to pass the new law were divisive. Most women members of Parliament, regardless of political stripe, opposed the legislation and were heckled and vulgarly insulted during a protest they staged several weeks ago. And while most leftists also rejected it, many within the principal center-left opposition coalition, whose roots are in Italy’s old, heavily Catholic Christian Democratic Party, voted in favor.

A group of intellectuals, including Italian Nobel laureate Rita Levi Montalcini, community leaders and scientists placed an ad this week in several Italian newspapers. The ad said some of the law’s measures, such as banning medical screening of embryos, were “astonishing from a scientific point of view, and revolting from a moral point of view.”

Cardinal Michele Giordano, the archbishop of Naples, used his Sunday sermon to speak in favor of the bill. “We simply want lawmakers to uphold the Fifth Commandment,” he said. “Thou shall not kill.”

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Livia Borghese in The Times’ Rome Bureau contributed to this report.