[Materno-fetal conflicts and the perinatal Medea syndrome: a cognitive analysis]

The definition of "maternal-fetal conflict" requires the attribution of a well-defined subjectivity at the product of conception, and thus, from the medical point of view, we need to consider the fetus as a patient. A tangible example of conflict in our society is the "Medea syndrome", a framework in which the female parent kills her fetus or child to take revenge on the partner. We have produced a questionnaire that was administered to 150 women admitted to the Department of "Obstetrics and Gynecology" of the "Santa Maria della Misericordia" Hospital, in Perugia. The results show the importance of the maternal-fetal conflict in our reality through the opinion that women have given in assessing particular situations that we have proposed in the questionnaire.