ROME – Italian prosecutors and the government’s privacy watchdog are investigating how the names of women who miscarried or had abortions ended up on crosses over graves for the fetuses in a Rome cemetery.Rights groups have denounced the grave markings as a gross violation of the women’s privacy, which is protected by the 1978 law that legalized abortion in Italy.
While regulations require burial of a fetus after 20 weeks, women who have complained said they never knowingly consented to the burials, much less to having their names put on crosses.The scandal — brought to light last month when a woman wrote on Facebook about happening upon her name on a cross in Rome's Flaminio Cemetery — has reverberated in this largely Roman Catholic.