A CROSS TO BEAR

Women in Italy have been left outraged after discovering their names on graves where their aborted fetuses were buried, reigniting the country’s debate on reproductive rights. Stefania D’Ignoti reports

- Stefania D'Ignoti

Francesca clearly remembers the sleepless nights she spent trying to ignore the fact that a tiny baby was fluttering in her stomach. As she wrestled with the idea of ending her pregnancy, “I would sleep standing to not feel the uneasiness, both physical and psychological,” she says, her eyes filling with tears as she recalls the memory.

At age 35, and at her fifth month of pregnancy, Francesca found out the baby girl she was expecting had a malformed heart, and was unlikely to survive the full term. In September 2019, she made the excruciating decision to have an abortion, struggling for months afterwards as she tried to convince herself that she had made the right choice for her family.

But on an early October morning last year, the dread came flooding back tenfold as she stood, horrified, in front of a grave bearing her own name. The letters, as well as the numbers of a fictional death date, were clearly marked on a white wooden cross that had been erected alongside hundreds of others in area 108 of Rome’s Flaminio cemetery (also known as Prima Porta), the largest in Italy.

The grave Francesca discovered was not her own, but that of the baby girl she had heart-wrenchingly decided to abort.

Letting out a desperate cry, “I doubled over, clutching my stomach as if I had been punched,” Francesca recalls. “I just kept thinking, How could someone do this to me, to any woman? Putting our names on those crosses felt like persecution. It immediately reawakened a dormant trauma.”

The devastating discovery uncovered the shocking truth about Italy’s so-called Fields of Angels, and the widespread practice of burying fetal remains without the mothers’ consent in dedicated areas across the country.