The city of Rome was fined Thursday by Italy’s privacy police for listing the names of women who had performed abortions on fetal graves without their consent.
At the end of September 2020, the discovery of these graves of aborted fetuses buried in the Flaminio Cemetery without the knowledge of their parents, whose names were written on the graves, had provoked the outrage of associations defending the rights of women and women involved. who denounced an invasion of their privacy.
Citing the ban on the dissemination of data on abortion, the DPA decided to impose a fine of 176,000 euros on the City of Rome and an additional fine of 239,000 euros on the AMA, the public company in charge of managing the cemeteries of the Italian capital .
In its press release, the agency also issued a warning to Rome’s primary health insurance company, which violated data protection laws that compromise privacy by providing WADA with the identity of each fetus of the woman who had an abortion.
In addition to these sanctions, the agency ordered the capital’s health insurance fund “to no longer ‘explicitly’ state identity on transport permits and medical certificates,” and suggested masking or encrypting that data to eliminate the possibility of identifying the woman fathered the aborted fetus.
The credit union must notify the AMF within two months of the election and adoption of such measures.
“We had to wait a long time, but today justice was done to so many women and to everyone who knew that this wrong was being done,” said Elisa Ercoli, President of the Association for the Defense of Women’s Rights “Differenza Donna”. quoted by the Italian agency AGI.
The scandal erupted in September 2020 after a woman who had an abortion spotted her name on a cross in Flaminio Cemetery, of which she posted a photo on Facebook that went viral.
Similar practices were later discovered in a cemetery in the northern city of Brescia.