US Anti-Abortion Film Gets Italian Teacher Sacked

Giorgio Nadali, a religion teacher in Milan who had taught for 26 years, published 9 books and contributed to several magazines, has been suspended from teaching the Catholic religion.

His “crime” was to show his secondary school students the famous 30-minute documentary The Silent Scream (whose video is above) in Italian.

The film was made in 1984 in the USA, narrated by obstetrician and gynecologist Bernard Nathanson, MD. It illustrates the abortion process via ultrasound and portrays an abortion taking place in the uterus.

It's a vivid representation of a voluntary termination of pregnancy from the viewpoint of the victim, for a change.

Dr Nathanson introduces the short ultrasound video by explaining that foetology, a medical discipline that has existed only for the last few decades, has helped to better understand the complexity of the human foetus.

No claim is made in the film about the foetus' capability to feel pain, which is still largely unknown. From Wikipedia:

The hypothesis that human fetuses are capable of perceiving pain in the early stages of a pregnancy has not received sufficient evidence to be proven or disproven; the developmental stage of research and instrumentation is so far insufficient to this task.

Some authors,[3] however, argue that fetal pain is possible from the second half, or even the second tremester,[4] of pregnancy.

Dr Nathanson also shows how the number of abortions per year in the United States dramatically increased from 100,000 in 1963 when abortion was still illegal, to 750,000 in 1973 when legalisation through the Roe v Wade decision was introduced, to 1,500,000 in 1983, the last year for which figures were available when the film was made. He recounts that an abortionist doctor and a radical pro-abortion feminist involved in the editing of the documentary were so shocked by it that they stopped their respective involvement in abortion.

This observation has an autobiographical angle: Nathanson himself, who grew up Jewish and helped to found the National Association for the Repeal of Abortion Laws to oppose restrictions on abortion, later became a pro-life activist. For more than 10 years after he became pro-life he described himself as a "Jewish atheist", but in 1996 he converted to Catholicism. So we can talk about a double conversion.

Some students of the Liceo Scientifico Cardano in Milan and their families complained to the school, and the religion teacher who showed the film was removed from his job.

The schoolgirls were 16–17, so the idea that the documentary was too shocking for them is not a good excuse. After all, pupils much younger than that, primary school children, are taught in school the "progressive" nature of homosexuality and onanism.

The real reason for the protest and sacking was that in our "post-Christian" society being against abortion is a much deadlier sin than abortion itself.