When I’m in Italy, I tend to focus on all things Italian.
I consume ridiculous quantities of pasta. I only drink Italian wines, although I did slip in a Bailey’s on the flight to Milan.
I listen to Italian music on my Spotify list, speak Italian, and watch Italian television, not that I have a choice. I do these things because I want to immerse myself fully in the ancestral way of life.
While watching Italian programming, I came across a particularly gruesome case of domestic abuse, involving a man and his pregnant girlfriend.
I am proudly and strongly pro-life. The only time I see abortion as a viable option is to save the life of the mother. But as I was watching the story of Giulia Tramontano, a woman whose boyfriend first poisoned her to kill the baby, then stabbed her to death when that didn’t work, I realized that abortion as a whole always diminishes the life of the mother while killing the baby.
That’s because it allows a woman to be seen essentially as an empty receptacle for an unwanted bunch of sinew and organs, instead of the most sacred carriers of the most precious miracle.
That’s exactly what happened in this case. The biological father Alessandro Impagniatello, had begun a new relationship and never told anyone about it.
He didn’t want the baby, which Giulia made clear was going to be born. She wanted the baby. And the fact that he did not was his problem, until he decided to make it hers by stabbing her to death, then burning her body to destroy the evidence.
Impagniatello was sentenced, again, to life imprisonment. He’d filed an appeal when he was originally convicted two years ago. This time, the court inexplicably found that the killer lacked premeditation, but nonetheless found him guilty of murder and interruption of a pregnancy. He will not see the light of day.
They didn’t say his sentence was so harsh because he’d killed two people, but that was essentially the reasoning. Impagniatello had taken two precious lives out of this world, and is now paying with the effective cessation of his own.
The Italians do not have the death penalty, so you have to have committed the most heinous of crimes to get what they call “l’ergastolo,” or a life sentence. Clearly, the judges found that trying to poison a woman to cause her to abort her deeply loved and wanted child qualified as just such an evil act.