LEANDRO ALETTI, THE “DEFENSOR VITAE” GYNECOLOGIST, IS DEAD
Professor Leandro “Leo” Aletti is died today 15 August 2022: gynecologistprofessor, head physician, father but above all man, he was born in Heaven on the day of the Assumption, stretched in the embrace of that faith to which he dedicated a whole life in carrying out his profession. Leandro Aletti was born in Varese on June 17, 1945, graduated in Medicine and Surgery on November 9, 1970, specialist in Obstetrics and Gynecology, since 1993 contract professor at the Second Obstetrics and Gynecological Clinic of the University of Milan: hospital at Mangiagalli Obstetric Clinic of Milan, since June 1999 Aletti has become a primary hospital at the Melegnano Hospital. Married with 8 children (one of them, Stefano, who died tragically at a very young age), he spent most of his 77 years pursuing his career as a gynecologist in an attempt to defend life in the very difficult years of the first selective and late abortions: around the 2000s it was also contested in the media for the very clear-cut ways it had of defending life from its conception. In a book called “Meat, bones, muscles and tendons – In defense of nascent life“, It was Dr. Aletti himself who told closely”battles, victories, defeats, joys and sorrows of an objector and Christian gynecologist “.
Mindful of the medical teachings in his long career as a researcher, but also firmly faithful to the Christian witness in the care and protection of life, the Professor Leo Aletti in 2012 told our newspaper his hidden desire for a life without abortion: “My hope for 2012 is that abortion will stop in the new year. Someone will object that there is no parliamentary majority to change the law. But hope is different from a mere calculation of probabilities, or from a simple desire“. Faced with the sometimes “shrewd” ways of approaching the complex political and social vicissitude of Law 194 on abortion in Italy, the teacher and gynecologist did not use half words: “unfortunately there is an abortionist mentality in Italy, and with the law 194 there have been six million abortions in all. To say that this would be a law in defense of women and for the right to free choice is hypocrisy. The point is that when you lose respect for life, it means that you no longer understand its meaning. Way, truth and life is in fact Jesus Christ. Even if today we want to lay another foundation for society». «He had a great commitment in the defense of life: as “defender of life” it is important to remember him precisely for his humanity»: This is how il Dr. Gianluigi Parentispecialist in Obstetrics and Gynecology and specialist in Experimental Endocrinology.
FROM STUDENT TO SON: THE MEMORY OF PROFESSOR LEANDRO “LEO” ALETTI
The national chronicles remember Professor Aletti for the famous “Mangiagalli case”, which exploded in January 1989 when Aletti together with his colleague and friend dr. Luigi Frigerio reported pregnancy interruptions after 90 days at the Milan clinic. Those practices seemed to violate Law 194 itself: a case that dragged on for a year and a half with inspections, inquiries, trials and amnesties. But more than “political” issues, what impressed Leandro Aletti’s long history as a gynecologist were his attempts to dissuade women who came to want to have an abortion. Also at the “Subsidiary”, Aletti told us now exactly 10 years ago how «abortion is an episode that a woman will never forget. And it happened to me that 60-year-old ladies, during their medical history in the hospital, after admitting to having made a voluntary interruption of pregnancy, began to cry». The human greatness of Professor Aletti was also in having gone ‘against’ the interests of his family at times and also his own, “often risking his career for his battles always for vita»Remembers Professor Parenti again. Defending life against everyone and in favor of that one, innocent and defenseless, who could come into the world: the pupil thus traces the figure of that man so clear-cut and at the same time committed to the mystery of life, “Faced with the protection of life and the unborn child, he has always been a great, generous, in fact a “martyr” in that he was harassed, judged and always persecuted for his defense of life».
According to Dr. Parenti, Leandro “Leo” Aletti was an authentic «giant, a teacher, I learned the trade from him: together with Doctor Frigerio they were giants»In their competence and in their extraordinarily human way of facing the advancing life, the life that knocks on the door of each of us every day. Parenti tells us he learned from Aletti and Frigerio “how to stand in front of life, they taught me to be a gynecologist by making me stand in front of the welcome of life since its conception“. In summary, concludes the teacher and gynecologist, “I am tiny in front of Aletti and Frigerio, yet they taught me everything in my work: not recognizing him as a teacher would be like saying that my dad is not my dad“. One of the 8 sons of Leandro Aletti, Riccardo, became a priest in 2020 after entering the seminary at the Fraternity of San Carlo Borromeo (founded in 1985 by Monsignor Massimo Camisasca, ed): he too began his career as a doctor, before being struck by the priestly vocation he encountered right in his labor of life in the ward. His son thus remembers in his brief “biography”, presented during his ordination, the example and testimony of that father Leandro, of which he – he says – will always remain grateful: “from an early age I listened to my father who, at the table, talked about his work as a gynecologist with doctor Frigerio in the front row in the hospital to fight for every nascent life“. For Don Riccardo Aletti, his father’s story remained a faithful sign of that faith which then grew to such an extent in adulthood that it became an authentic vocation: “every patient who decided on an abortion was for them a very deep wound, something that did not leave them calm. In me, it became clearer and clearer that life is good, whatever can be accessedWhy there is a Father who continually gives it to us».
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