When I’m in Italy, I tend to focus on all things Italian. I consume ridiculous quantities of pasta. I drink Italian wines, although I did slip in a Bailey’s on the flight to Milan.
I listen to Italian music on my Spotify list, speak Italian, and watch Italian TV, not that I have a choice. I do these things because I want to immerse myself fully in the ancestral way of life. Watching Italian programming, I came across a particularly gruesome case of domestic abuse, involving a man and his pregnant girlfriend.
I am proudly and strongly pro-life. The only time I see abortion as a viable option is to save the life of the mother. But as I was watching the story of Giulia Tramontano, a woman whose boyfriend first poisoned her to kill the baby, then stabbed her to death when that didn’t work, I realized abortion as a whole always diminishes the life of the mother while killing the baby. That’s because it allows a woman to be seen as an empty receptacle for an unwanted bunch of sinew and organs, instead of the most sacred carriers of the most precious miracle. That’s what happened in this case. The biological father, Alessandro Impagniatello, had begun a new relationship and never told anyone about it.
He didn’t want the baby, which Giulia made clear was going to be born. She wanted the baby. The fact that he did not was his problem, until he decided to make it hers by stabbing her, then burning her body to destroy the evidence.
Impagniatello was sentenced, again, to life imprisonment. He’d filed an appeal when he was originally convicted two years ago. This time, the court inexplicably found that the killer lacked premeditation, but nonetheless found him guilty of murder and interruption of a pregnancy. They didn’t say his sentence was so harsh because he’d killed two people, but that was essentially the reasoning. He had taken two precious lives out of this world, and is now paying with the effective cessation of his own.
The Italians do not have the death penalty, so you have to commit heinous crimes to get a life sentence. Clearly, the judges found that trying to poison a woman to cause her to abort her deeply loved and wanted child qualified as just such an evil act. The judges were deliberating as my pro-life friends in America were celebrating the third anniversary of the Dobbs decision, which demolished the lie that killing an unborn child is a constitutional right.
And they were still deliberating when I spoke up at this Italian legal conference I’m attending to suggest that Roe v. Wade was a barbaric decision. Interestingly, no one heckled or mocked me, as happened at a conference I once gave for the Women’s Section of the Philadelphia Bar Association.
Those ladies were not amused by my pro-life advocacy. The Italian women I’ve met seem to have a more nuanced, empathetic and humane view of unborn life. They also dress a lot better.
And right after they handed down the life sentence, our U.S. Supreme Court rendered a decision that will make it much easier to defund Planned Parenthood, an organization that has only one goal: convince women they are slaves if they cannot exercise the right to kill their babies.
I feel blessed to be in Italy, for an incalculable number of reasons. But I believe one of the most important issues is human dignity.
Sentencing a man to life for killing his pregnant girlfriend isn’t enough, especially when you don’t find premeditation.
Defunding Planned Parenthood isn’t enough. Sending abortion back to the states isn’t enough, especially in a state with a governor who is giddy over his love and support for abortion. Watching as a court in my ancestral home says “we speak for two victims,” though, is powerful stuff.
Christine Flowers is an attorney and a columnist for the Delaware County Daily Times in Pennsylvania.
