On Sunday, Italians started voting on whether to relax the current strict Fertility Law in a two-day referendum. According to the Associated Press, the turnout of the vote has been very low. It may be attributed to the intervention of the Roman Catholic Church, which strongly disagrees with the law amendment and has urged its flock to boycott the vote.

The Fertility Law in Italy is one of the toughest in Europe when compared to the increasingly liberal trends spreading across the continent over recent years. It bans egg or sperm donations from outside a couple as well as embryo screening, freezing and research.

The proposed change of the law includes authorisation of medical research on embryos, scraping a reference to the embryo as a full human being and giving people with hereditary diseases access to medically-assisted procreation, currently permitted only to sterile couples, according to the Associated Press.

In addition, the proposal will also ask whether to abolish current restrictions which only allow couples to create three embryos that must all be implanted at the same time, and without checking whether they carry genetic diseases.

A week ago, Pope Benedict XVI gave an address at a conference of the Diocese of Rome regarding the role of the family, where he sternly denounced same-sex union, abortion and embryo research.

Pope Benedict, well-known as an enforcer of Catholic doctrines and defender of deeply conservative values, he spoke of the traditional Catholic teaching based on the Bible. He said that "Children are the fruit of marriage and reflects God’s love for man." He therefore condemned "terminating or manipulating life".

He called for Christians to publicly reaffirm the "intangibility of human life from conception to its natural end."

Despite the strong Catholic Influence over the country, many Italians have criticised that the current Fertility Law is too restrictive and campaigned for a free choice of people, especially from many women's groups. The call has appeared to have become overwhelming after the UK as well as many other countries in the world have passed the legislation for embryonic stem cell research and new breakthroughs on medical grounds have been achieved.

The Associated Press reported that four million signatures were gathered by rights campaigners and lawmakers to back a court action calling for the law to be modified by referendum.

Leading Catholic politicians have rejected the Catholic Church’s interference in the vote of the state laws. The Italian President and his wife, who are both devout Catholics, were among the first to cast their ballots.

Only 18.7 percent of eligible voters had cast their ballots by Sunday in the vote, according to the Associated Press. The voting will continue on Monday and will be close at 3:00pm (1500 GMT). More than 50 percent must vote for the result to be binding.