It was 2013 when Beatrice*, an Italian woman living in Turin, received an unexpected letter. The local administration was informing her of the end of the cemetery concession for a grave in her family’s name. Having recently lost her father, Beatrice didn’t understand why the letter mentioned an exhumation. He had been cremated, not buried. Confused, she called the local administration. “A quite embarrassed employee told me the grave was older, the remains dated back to 2008,” she tells The Independent. “I connected it immediately. Someone had buried my foetus.”
Beatrice's child was one of the thousands of embryos and foetuses that are buried by Defending Life with Mary (Advm). A Catholic anti-choice association, Advm has been creating agreements with hospitals and local authorities for 20 years to collect the remains of miscarriages and abortions. The association gives them a burial ceremony in specifically devoted graveyard areas (called Gardens of Angels) - all without the parents’ knowledge.
Five years before the call, Beatrice had become pregnant for the first time. Unfortunately, amniocentesis results showed the foetus suffered from trisomy, a chromosomal abnormality consisting in the presence of three copies of a chromosome instead of two. After days of sorrow and reflection, Beatrice and her partner decided to have an abortion.
“My foetus would have had to live in this world. A world that judges, where they would never have had the chance to make a life for themselves. I didn't want to create pain for them,” she says.
At no point of the abortion process was she asked to authorise Advm to hold a funeral for what she calls her foetus.
“What the association did not only made me sad, but also very angry. How could this happen?”
On contacting the hospital, she received a letter from the medical chief, saying it was customary at the time to communicate burial arrangements orally, and the medical chief suggested that maybe, given the painful and confusing moment, she just did not comprehend what they had told her about burial procedures.
“It definitely was a difficult time but the burial information is something you pay attention to,” Beatrice insists.
Although abortion is legal in Italy, not all hospitals provide the service. But for those that do, allowing an external organisation to conduct the burial on your behalf is completely legal. As per Article 7 of Presidential Decree 285/1990, Italians are required to submit, within 24 hours of the surgery, a request for burial from the hospital. If they fail to do so, the hospital then has legal ownership of the foetus.
As Advm’s president, Father Maurizio Gagliardini, explained to The Independent: “If the parents do not submit the request within 24 hours, their right ceases to apply. At the end of the 24th hour, we take over.”
Father Gagliardini says that in 17 years, the group has buried some 100,000 embryos and foetuses, across 60 Italian cities.
Confronted with the issue of the lack of the parents’ explicit consent, the president reiterates the legal aspect of their work. The Independent has contacted the ministry of health for a comment.
To try to gauge a sense of the scale of the practice, journalist and author Jennifer Guerra has created an interactive map tracking all known graveyards for foetuses. So far, she has counted almost 50 graveyards concentrated in northern Italy - but believes the real figure is much higher.
Finding all those things [at the grave], the teddy bears, seemed to say ‘you didn't take care of it but luckily someone did’
“It’s so difficult to find these graveyards, especially in smaller towns. In a country where the Church is deeply involved in the daily services of graveyards, these ‘gardens of angels’ are considered normal - that's also why it's so difficult to gather official data.”
As Jennifer explains, graves may contain multiple foetuses, making it difficult to know how many have been buried across the country.
“I heard from women who live in the municipalities where this practice takes place and they didn’t know anything. You can sign for the hospital to take care of it while, in reality, the association takes care of it. This is an absolute lack of freedom of choice, awareness and consent of the people concerned,” she adds.
The phenomenon has sparked controversy, with feminist groups attacking this practice and fighting for the right of women to be fully informed. From Civitavecchia near Rome to Varese in the far north of the country, they have organised protests against what they see as an attack against women’s rights, especially in a country where seven out of 10 gynaecologists are conscientious objectors.
Alessia Consiglio, a member of feminist collective and blog NarrAzioni Differenti, warns that the growing influence of pro-life and far-right movements in Italy is stoking fears that women’s rights could be curbed even further.
“They have been deconstructing years of fights for women's rights - but we must keep fighting,” she says.
A key issue with the law is its ambiguity, as it doesn’t say which authority will carry out the burials. By leaving them in the hands of Advm, a Catholic association, they will have religious implications that many people might not be comfortable with.
Not being Catholic, Beatrice felt the funeral was a violation of her will.
“Discovering Advm’s burial meant going back to that first sorrow and mourning and the imposition of a sense of guilt,” she says. “Finding all those things [at the grave], the teddy bears, seemed to say ‘you didn't take care of it but luckily someone else did.’"
* Names have been changed
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