Medicina Nei Secoli

The Irish legal framework regulating abortion represents one of the most restrictive ones worldwide. It allows for abortion only when medical practitioners assess a risk of lfe of the pregnant woman, therefore excluding the vast majority of women from legality, and not allowing them to have control over their own bodies. The only option in order to have a lawfid termination is travelling abroad. Against such background, this article holds that the Irish legislation on abortion creates three levels of 'invisible women'...

As a result of the contamination of blood supplies, Mexican government prohibited the 'paid donation' (1987) and the country formally joined the framework promoted by WHO and PAHO focused on the enhancement of repetitive altruistic donation. Nevertheless, this kind of donation is still minoritarian in the Mexican Republic and it is largely majoritarian a blood management system that has not received particular attention from the social sciences: the replacement donation. In the article, I describe and analyze the dynamics of replacement donation, following the results of a fieldwork that I have conducted in the city of Oaxaca since 2013...

Until the so-called sanitary reform (1978), which introduced a Beveridge' system, in Italy existed a peculiar kind of general practitioner, paid by municipalities, who ensured healthcare to those not covered by social insurance. In small towns those physicians also carried out the finction of Health Officers, performing Public Health duties. We had the possibility to study the very large archive of one of them, doctor Sgandurrafrom Farindola, a village in the Abruzzi Region (central Italy): in the paper we briefly analyse six public health acts that he issued in the first half of the 1950s...

This article discusses the hypothesis that the ram's heads on the speculum recovered in Pompeii in 1881-82 had some symbolic significance - on the basis of the connection between the ram and the human reproductive organs, well testified in Egyptian mythology. Infact, there is ample evidence of Egyptian influence in Pompeii, particularly nearby the houses where we presume the discovery of the speculum was made.

This article discusses the issue of abortion stigma and conscientious objection based on the main results of a qualitative study carried out in hospitals providing abortion care in Italy and Spain (Catalunya). This study was aimed at examining obstetricians-gynaecologists' experiences and attitudes to abortion, or voluntary interruption of pregnancy. The abortion law is relatively liberal in these two Catholic countries (much more liberal in Spain than in Italy). However, abortion still is strongly stigmatized in the public debate on human and reproductive rights, whose focus has shifted, over the last decade, from women's rights to the "rights of the conceived"...

This essay aims at delving into the issues raised by the application of the Law No. 194/1978 in the matter of the voluntary termination of pregnancy, taking into account the constitutional principles, the judgments of the Italian Constitutional Court and the recent decision on the merit of the Collective Complaint No. 87/2012 (International Planned Parenthood Federation European Network v. Italy) adopted by the European Committee of Social Rights.

Often a woman's right to terminate a pregnancy for health reasons is considered as achieved by simply performing the intervention. But today isn't in doubt that the effective protection of health requires that health organizations carrying out performance which also affect other aspects: taking charge of women, information on services, respect for the dignity and autonomy of women, etc ... You could say that these are details, compared to the final performance. But, as we know, often the devil is in the details...

This article explores the origins and the development of women-protective anti-abortion arguments in a globalized world. Unlike fetus-base pro- life arguments, women protective ones focus on gender stereotypes and on the theory of gender complementarity. The article traces the influence of US conservative groups in spreading such arguments beyond the US borders, so that in today's globalized world, womnen-protective arguments have become central in abortion and contraception related legislation and litigation in the US, Europe and Russia...

The right to abortion was the forerunner of a new idea of liberty, the liberty from gender roles which 'naturalize' oppressive social constructs. In Italy, in the Seventies of the 20th Century, some feminist opinions objected, in the name offemale liberty, to the battle for the right to abortion and against gender roles. This, they .argued, could cost women to disclaim their sex as a resource for self-identification and social change. Actually, forty years after its legalisation, abortion remains controversial, nor tells it much about female liberty...

The paper examines the particular nature of the rights involved in disciplines related to the termination of pregnancy. It focuses on the ways by which these rights must be appropriately balanced with constitutional rights and values. It also stresses the need of a "botton-up" approach rather than a more restrictive and dangerous "top-down" approach. Only in this way it seems possible to tackle and appreciate the problem in all its actual complexity.

Law 194 was introduced in Italy in 1978, following a campaign by women's groups, but alsofollowing the rise in illegal abortions and related deaths; after quite 40 years, we are now assisting to the dangerous return to illegality, related with the obstacles to the application of the law. The main causes of this phenomena are: the conscientious objection, the non- compliance of the law and the providers' "burn-out". The law permits to medical and non medical personnel to refuse to carry out abortions on conscientious groumds, but this right is greatly abused, with harmfil consequences on women's health...

After an analysis of the history of the introduction of the so called "abortion pill" in various countries included Italy, it is analyzed the substantial differences between the two procedures of medical abortion comparing with surgical abortion.

Perception of guilt and remorse is tied to the complicated question of what is an abortion. There is no doubt that abortion practices have had a long and complex history. Abortion is, in fact, a 'mobile' category, whose definition and identification depends on several factors and is related to the context and - not least - the complex question of identifying the actual voluntariness of the act. The frequency of spontaneous abortions, due to -excessive force or working conditions, and the inevitability of the appeal to the interruption of pregnancy in the absence of other means of fertility control methods, allowed a widespread lack of guilt, testified also by language even in the mid-twenties, when the fascist regime begins to structure a policy that culminates, during the thirties, in unprecedented emphasis on the role and the female body in an exclusively procreative function and configuration of maternity as a patriotic duty particularly enshrined in the new Penal code of 1930...

In the society of the ancient Greece sacred laws on the abortion are a typical example of a mixture between the temple wisdom tradition and the medical tugvr. The epigraphic discoveries made between the end of the nineteenth century and the beginning of the twentieth century in Cos and Cyrene offered meaningfid evidences of the cooperation between priests and physicians to evaluate each single case of abortion and impose the right atonement. This contribution aims at showing how firm the line of continuity between medicine as wisdom and medicine as T Xvn was in the ancient Greece, focusing on the hot topic of the abortion...

Abortion has become something to hide, something you can't tell other people, something you have to expiate forever. Besides, abortion is more and more difficult to achieve because of the raising average of consciencious objection (from 70 to 90% of health care providers are conscientious objectors, 2014 data, Ministero della Salute) and illegal abortion is "coming back"from the 70s, when abortion was a crime (Italian law n. 194/1978). Abortion is often blamed as a murder, an unforgivenable sin, even as genocide...

No abstract text is available yet for this article.

No abstract text is available yet for this article.

This article aims at dealing with the historical development and the terminology of the notion of generation in ancient Greece, taking as well into consideration several aspects of the notion of heredity, for, at present, research in this field lacks a consistent encyclopedic entry on such subjects. The Presocratic - mainly Empedoclean - notions of 'mixing' and 'separation' lurk behind the Hippocratic treatise De genitura/De natura pueri, in which the process of generation is explained through the 'mixing' mechanism of a female semen and a male one...

The term "enhancement" has come to represent a very precise form of improving individual skills. By means of pharmaceutics, surgery, and reproductive technology, all originally intended for clinical use, healthy individuals may improve their cognitive and emotional capacities for many reasons, such as to gain a competitive edge. In today's society, cognitive performance and mood assume a more relevant role than physical ability if one aspires to emerge above the average. In this paper, we present and discuss common views on "neuroenhancement," a term often used to describe the use of artificial means that interfer with brain function to improve cognitive skills...

In the area of Rome object of study, the cremations account for 10% of total burials (522 cremation burials of 4758), unlike the contemporary cemeteries of French and Cispadane areas where they are well over 30%. Detailed analysis of the cemeteries, confirms that the indirect cremations (urns and graves) represent over 85% of the sample, while direct cremations (busta sepulcra) are under-represented. For a selected sample of 69 cremations, demographic analysis was performed and it shows a discrete prevalence of women and an almost equal distribution of males and subadults...