La legge sulla procreazione medicalmente assistita al vaglio della Corte costituzionale

In 2004, the Italian Parliament passed a law about medically assisted insemination which attracted criticism from the beginning. This led to a referendum campaign, whose aim was to submit the whole law, or at least large parts of it, to a popular vote. The Constitutional Court held that the request to repeal the entire law was inadmissible, but did accept all the other requests regarding the fundamental aspects of the law. This essay sets out to demonstrate that this decision was inconsistent, analysing the details of the arguments used by the Court to reject the request for the law’s complete repeal and the ones in favour of the admissibility of all the other requests. In a few "intermezzos", the author deals with some matters which are still open, in spite of the result of the referendum (which confirmed the law, since the number of voters did not reach the constituted quorum of 50% plus 1): the problem of superfluous embryos, prenatal diagnosis and the risks of eugenetics, the embryo as a new juridical subject and the problem of heterologous insemination.

Paolo Becchi, La legge sulla procreazione medicalmente assistita al vaglio della Corte costituzionale in "SOCIOLOGIA DEL DIRITTO " 2/2006, pp , DOI: