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 Tenor's story acclaimed by anti-abortion campaigners
The anti-abortion movement was yesterday hailing the popular Italian tenor Andrea Bocelli as a hero after he described how his mother had rejected advice from her doctors to abort him.
Jason Jones, founder of the Los Angeles-based Human Rights, Education and Relief Organisation, said a video of the blind singer posted to the web by a supporter of his group in Italy was "one of the most beautiful, authentic things I've ever seen".
Bocelli's video shows the tenor seated at a piano as he announces that he wants to recount "a little story": that of a young wife who goes to hospital because of what is mistakenly thought to be appendicitis. "The doctors had to put ice on her stomach, her belly," he says.
In between phrases picked out on the piano, he adds: "At the end of these treatments, the doctors advised her to abort the child. They told her that would be the best solution because the child would doubtless be born with some kind of disability.
"But the courageous young wife decided not to terminate the pregnancy and the child was born. The woman was my mother, I was the child," says Bocelli.
"I may be biased. But I can tell you it was the right choice, and I hope that this will encourage other mothers who are perhaps at a difficult moment in life but want to save the lives of their children."
Bocelli's partner, Veronica Berti, said she was present when the recording was made last year.
"When I heard his words I had to leave because I was starting to cry," she told the daily Corriere della Sera.
A spokesman for the singer said the key to the story was in the reference to the "odd treatment" his mother was given because of the mistaken diagnosis. The doctors "feared they had carried out a treatment that had jeopardised the foetus," he said.
Bocelli's blindness would seem to be unrelated. He was born with a congenital condition that left him partially blind, but only lost his sight altogether after a football accident when he was 12.
He was born in 1958 when abortion was illegal in Italy except in cases of severe foetal deformity or where the life of the mother was in danger. Though illegal, abortion was widely practised.
An agnostic for many years, Bocelli has stated that he returned to the Catholicism of his youth in 1994. Though separated from his first wife, he has not divorced to remarry Berti.
The video was recorded for an event organised by a children's welfare organisation supported by Bocelli, his spokesman said.
Bocelli is the latest in a series of celebrities to have revealed that they narrowly avoided being aborted. The England and Liverpool footballer Jamie Carragher last year praised his mother for rejecting the advice of doctors who thought, wrongly, he suffered from spina bifida.
In February, 100 million TV viewers saw an advert during the Super Bowl describing how the mother of the Denver Broncos' quarterback, Tim Tebow, also refused to terminate her pregnancy.
(2010-06-10/ guardian.co.uk)
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