Italian Police Storm Hospital to Prevent a Late-Term Abortion

Posted by Bean , Lawyers, Guns and Money at 8:22 AM on February 20, 2008.

Is this what we're heading toward here in the U.S.? In Naples last week, police stormed into a hospital based on an anonymous tip that doctors there had performed an abortion later than 24 weeks (the latest date allowed under the country's 30-year-old abortion law). From the NY Times:

[P]olice officers entered the hospital and interrogated a Neapolitan woman, identified in the news media only by her first name, Silvana, immediately after the abortion and reportedly while she was still under the effects of anesthesia. They seized the aborted fetus.

Carmine Nappi, the chief of obstetrics at the hospital, likened the police intrusion to an anti-Mafia raid. “We’ve had countless complaints, we’re a hospital, but never a blitz like this,” he said by telephone on Thursday.

Nice one. Of course, tests proved that the fetus was 21 weeks gestational age, and that the woman had chosen to terminate the pregnancy based on tests that showed a serious fetal abnormality.

This "anti-mafia" style raid comes in the context of a new attack on the country's abortion law. With the parliament dissolved and elections looming, conservative leaders are using abortion as a tool to mobilize voters. To Americans familiar with the elections of 2000 and 2004, this is nothing new: the right here has for a while now made contentious social issues loom large in order to scare voters (particularly religious conservatives) to the polls.

Bean is a third-year law student in New York City. Her blogging focuses on the intersections of criminal justice, reproductive rights, gender equality, and drug policy.