The president of the Italian Pro-Life Movement, Carlo Casini, said this week the Italian baby who survived an abortion and died a few days later “was not just a cluster of cells but rather a healthy boy, a child who could have come into this world had the pregnancy lasted a little bit longer.”

“The case in Florence of the abortion survivor, that is, of a little body 25 centimeters long and weighing 17 ounces, who struggled after leaving his mother’s body, emitting small sounds, finally speaks,” Casini wrote in his editorial for the monthly magazine, “Yes to Life.”

The flawed diagnosis that the baby might be deformed and subsequent attempt to abort caused “great distress in the people, such that it would have been better if the [media] had simply ignored it,” and thus revealed “a culture in which the health have a right to life but not the one who needs to be cured,” he said.

Casini explained that we live “in a horrible culture against which we must urgently react.”  He proposed mandatory autopsies on all aborted fetuses and more accurate pre-natal diagnosis, as well as the application of the law “in the least perverse way possible, ensuring that the principle of preference for birth prevail” over every other option.