ABSTRACT: Inspired by the recollection of the emotion with which a meeting of his on abortion had been welcomed in a small village near Salerno, Pannella launches an appeal to intensify efforts to start collecting signatures for the referendum on abortion.

(L'Espresso - April 1975 from "Marco Pannella - Works and speeches - 1959-1980", Gammalibri, January 1982)

A show was scheduled to take place that evening (the last of the electoral campaign) in Santa Maria di Castellabate, on the Gulf of Salerno. The remains of the small village, impoverished by a secular, indiscriminate migration, were all gathered in the square, too large between the small houses that descended to the sea; fishermen, deformed by arthritis so as to resemble olive trees, old women clad in black with wrinkled faces, younger mothers, lonely and restless girls. In the back, leaning against the church, whence they had taken a few chairs, two priests and some friends were listening too.

We had just arrived from a series of other meetings, Lino Jannuzzi and I, and were standing on the small, unsafe platform between the local notables. There was also a young woman running for election. With an act of clarity which others judged foolhardy, she had insisted that I support her battle on divorce, on this civil battle which was not even over in Parliament, where representatives from all parties evoked the spectres of the immaturity of our people, especially of the people of the South, of the country, of the women, to use them as alibis for their sluggishness.

They had advised me to be prudent. As always, I agreed completely, even if they did not believe it. Together with hope, this virtue (if it is not degraded to calculation and convenience) is the most precious and necessary of all virtues. As they "introduced" me to these humble and poor people, with the exaggerated rhetoric and emphasis which those who consider these people inferior, a good but base mob, use in such circumstances, with the squalor of the political alienation and those grotesque and stale words, I started feeling ill at ease. I wanted to go away, that was not my place.

A dozen youngsters, paid (or hoping to be so) to act as "claque" acclaimed my name, which they had no reasons to be familiar with. Behind them, the wall of motionless, hard, hollow faces was made of extraneousness, of an age-old, desperate and confirmed refusal.

It was too late to give up talking. What else could I say but a truth more essential, simple and "private" than the purified and scandalous truth, in the eyes of our policy, against which we were struggling by supporting the "Fortuna bill"?

Thus, in spring of five years ago, we held the first electoral meeting devoted entirely to abortion, sex, and women's liberation. As I talked, and described things which according to others should necessarily be excluded from the field of politics and be part of "private" talks relative to love and friendship, faced to the reaction I felt and which urged me talk for over an hour, I clearly perceived something I have often tried to express since then. We live in an epoch in which "agorà" and "ecclesia" - open space and prayer assembly - often overlap. The silence was unreal, almost religious.

The words fell heavily like stones, and the explicit aggression to "politics" which they want to force us to rang cruel. But when I finished I was surrounded by the old women in black, (and how many of them!), who silently touched me. I remember their hands stretching themselves toward me, like a blessing, the familiar peasant hands of my childhood in the Abruzzi, and I still remember their bare and sweet exhortation: "thank you, son!".

Five years have gone by. Will others, at the June elections, now have the intelligence of an explicit and all-out struggle, for a true liberation and a true alternative? We shall see, and no doubt judge and intervene. But we must work humbly, tending the tables for the collection of signatures, organizing, clearing the field of declamatory and gestural habits, with the concentration and harshness necessary for a battle from which the rich, the powerful, the authoritative, seem to have once more decided to be absent. We need not envy the "elsewhere" in which they continue to isolate and suffocate us: we acknowledge it. Nor can we continue to wait for you, comrade De Martino (1). Starting this battle is already a first, necessary victory without which everything would seem easier, simply because there is nothing to risk or to hope.

We need to appeal to our readers, to our companions and friends, so that everything be clear, at least among us. We no longer need socialist, communist, libertarian "companions" or republican, lay, liberal friends; we need socialists, communists, libertarians who are capable of being "companions", we need republicans, lay, liberals capable of being true "friends".

A friendship and companionship which is not based on the ribbons of the campaigns or of the ideological professions, or of the braids conquered yesterday for stale battles such as living on unearned income and on sadness, but which is based on today's activity, day by day, hour by hour.

Over three hundred thousand have signed, declaring themselves willing to support this common initiative. Where are they, since they cannot see us and I cannot see them?

On the basis of the addresses which this newspaper is publishing, the demonstrations it is pointing out, the political orientations it is providing, we give form and duration to the popular unity on civil rights, to the alternative prospects, against the Moros (2) and the Fanfanis (3), against a regime which, in order to better succeed to itself, explicitly prepares the tightening up of the authoritative and fascist laws to the point of proposing the licence to kill every suspect and every misfit, of a "different", more human society and politics. In the meanwhile, on the referendum...

Translator's notes

(1) Francesco De Martino (1907): Italian politician. Secretary of the Socialist Party from 1964 to 1966, and from '72 to '76 (joint secretary of the Unified Socialist Party, '66-70). Vice Prime Minister (('68-72).

(2) Aldo Moro (1916-1978): Italian politician. Secretary of the Christian Democratic Party (1959-65), minister on several occasions, Prime Minister ('63-68), he was the mastermind of the Centre-Left policy. Foreign Minister ('69-74), Prime Minister ('74-76), President of the DC since 1976, he favoured the participation of the Communist Party in the government. He was kidnapped by the Red Brigades on 16.3.78 and found dead on 9.5.1978.

(3) Amintore Fanfani (1908): Politician. Professor of economic history, secretary of the Christian Democrat Party (1954-59; '73-75), Prime Minister ('58-59; '60-62; '62-63; '82-83), foreign minister ('64-65; '65-68), president of the Senate ('68-73; '76-82).