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5 Between Church and State: Stem Cells, Embryos, and Citizens in Italian Politics Ingrid Metzler By the evening of June 13, 2005, Cardinal Camillo Ruini, then head of the Italian Bishops’ Conference (Conferenza Episcopale Italiana), appeared deeply satisfied.1 It was the evening following a national referendum in which the Italian electorate had voted on the relaxation of Italy’s “norms in matter of medically assisted procreation” (norme in materia di procreazione medicalmente assistita) (Repubblica Italiana 2004). The results, as the cardinal explained on the evening news, had “exceeded all [his] expectations” (La Repubblica.it 2005). The referendum was the first test of the law that had moved Italy from the unregulated and permissive end of the regulatory landscape to its most restrictive edge. Italy’s voting citizens had a chance to decide whether they wanted to modify the law in such a way as to remove many of the restrictions on human embryonic stem cell (hESC) research. Yet only a quarter of the electorate turned out to cast their votes in this referendum. This was precisely what the cardinal had sought to achieve when he had called on Italians to abstain from voting. Once the polls closed, the Cardinal modestly declared that he had “only sought to carry out [his] duty as bishop” (qtd. in Politi 2005, 2). But before the referendum, he had chosen a rather worldly strategy of political mobilization (or, more accurately, immobilization) to implement his pious mission. Although the Italian constitution enables abrogative referenda to repeal a law in whole or in part, such a referendum can only be valid if a minimum of 50 percent plus one of the Italian electorate casts a vote. Thus, in January 2005, when the Constitutional Court approved the embryo research referendum, the cardinal chose not to rely simply on the docile souls of his flock, but also on the inert bodies of those Italians who never cast their votes in such proceedings. Apparently, the cardinal deemed it more feasible to convince 50 percent of the Italian electorate to not participate than to trust the majority to choose the right answer. Ruini’s strategy of promoting abstention (or electoral abstinence) was later 106 Chapter 5 embraced by other groups. And it proved successful. As 74.3 percent of voters deserted the polls, the referendum was invalid and Ruini’s mission was accomplished. Though the Catholic hierarchy’s invitations to sexual abstinence may often have gone unheard by their unmarried flocks, the Cardinal’s call for political abstinence seems to have been not only heard but also gladly accepted by the Italian electorate. The result was that Law 40 (legge quaranta), as the law is conventionally termed, continued to bar Italian scientists from “killing” Italian embryos for stem cell procurement but did not forbid them from engaging in this line of research altogether. Italian scientists are still allowed to conduct hESC research, provided that they draw on hESC lines that are imported from abroad and hence not derived from Italian embryos. As yet, the work of the barely half-dozen groups who engage in hESC research in Italy is tacitly tolerated but not publicly supported. All national funds are invested in research projects that draw on stem cells derived from animals, adult tissues, cord blood, or aborted fetuses. Scientists engaging in hESC research depend on private funding or funding from the European Union’s Framework Programmes (Abbott 2009; Cattaneo et al. 2009). But why has Italy refrained from embracing a line of research that many other nations have seized upon? And why was Italy’s abstinence contested? In this chapter , I attempt to make sense of these questions. I argue that Italian hESC politics emerged from the flip side of a larger bioconstitutional project in which the foundations of Italy’s biopolitics were reordered through the “nationalization” of Italian embryos. Italian hESC politics provides a window through which this bioconstitutional project can be explored through the back door. Although the nationalization of Italian embryos restricted the material of Italian hESC research, it also gave Italian hESCs their particular meaning as signifiers of a battle for rights and liberties against an oppressive state and its Roman Catholic ally. I start with a brief discussion of an early period of Italian hESC politics in which hESC research was unregulated and very much a nonissue.2 This period ended in February 2004, when Italian legislators regulated the range of permissible practices in Italian fertility laboratories, establishing the “norms in the matter...

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