La legge italiana sulla c.d. “procreazione medicalmente assistita”: l’opera di svuotamento da parte della magistratura e i possibili rimedi

The article starts recalling the position of the Catholic Church doctrine on the medically assisted procreation (MAP). Notably, if on the one hand any artificial intervention on human procreation is valued as moral illicit, on the other hand it exist the moral duty to reach the maximum possible good in the concrete circumstances. Then, the paper traces out some aspects of the history of the Italian Law n. 40 of 19th February 2004 (it outcome from a long and arduous process, approved by the most of the Parliament in 2004 and confirmed by popular referendum in 2005), and it reconstructs the whole court case concerning the Italian law on “medically assisted reproduction”. Finally the Author try to draw some operative line to protect at least the heart of the law concentrated in art. 1: “the Law guarantees the rights of all stakeholders, including the conceived”. Because of this reason, the law has been harshly opposing and currently it has been dismantled in some important respects by two constitutional judgments (151/2009 and 162/2014). The hostilities come from an alternative culture to what which carried out 40/2004 Law 40, a culture exclusively focused to achieving the alleged “new civil rights” of adults (to-be parents, medical doctors and scientists) and that does not tolerate boundaries arising from the rights of the unborn. Although this is not a Catholic law, it still deserves to be defended, the Author deem. In front of the embryos cryopreserved storage, the heterologous fertilization and finally the embryos experimentation which is looming large, it should be strongly reaffirmed the donor-conceived offspring right to know one’s own origins and the right to life of human embryos. Although the article moves primarily on the legal (judicial and legislative) level, it is important to keep alive the commitment to the promotion of the dignity of human procreation on the level of education and culture.