What happens when politicians polarize a human right for their own gain?  In light of America’s overturning of Roe v. Wade, many countries across the globe have reignited conversations surrounding women’s rights to abortion. Noticing the surge in popularity that American politicians have after building their base on divisive issues, right-wing parties in Italy have been following suit and advocating for the implementation of laws that would drastically limit access to abortion.

This type of campaigning has proved successful for the right-wing coalition of Fratelli d’Italia, Forza Italia, and Lega, which recently won a majority of the seats in parliament. Their representative Giorgia Meloni also swore into the role of Prime Minister (PM), having comfortably passed the vote of confidence with 115 votes in favor and 79 against. When asked about abortion, the newly elected PM has expressed her idea for a law that would extend the rights of the Italian constitution to begin at conception, rather than at the time of birth. 

However, with issues such as the energy crisis, the looming recession, and the country’s crumbling economy dominating Italian discourse, Meloni’s proposed anti-abortion law is nowhere near her priority list. Even without the prime minister’s interference on abortion, the current landscape in Italy severely limits the autonomy and livelihood of women across the nation. 

In Italy, womens’ right to abortion is protected by Legge 194. Still, the law does not adequately guarantee access to abortion for many Italian women; most Italian doctors are unwilling to provide the service to a vast majority of women. This lack of protection stems from the original intent of the law: codified in 1978 by the Italian Socialist Party and the Italian Communist Party, the goal of the law was to decriminalize, rather than legalize, abortion. Arguably, this approach yielded extremely successful results at the time, as Legge 194 obtained near full approval both from the Senate and from the Italian House and was one of the first true pieces of legislation that directly challenged one of the most strongly felt topics of the Vatican. Women were finally not criminalized for having abortions and were no longer forced to seek clandestine alternatives.

Despite its initial success, Legge 194 is an antiquated piece of legislation that is in desperate need of additional reforms. The law grants practitioners and gynecologists the right to refuse a patient an abortion treatment for their own ‘ethical or religious reasons’. This creates deserts that make access to abortion extremely limited to not existent in select regions. Research conducted by Italian newsletter La Repubblica found that these areas are more common in southern regions of Italy, with as many as 93.3% of doctors in Molise, 87.6% in Sicily, and 86.1% in Apulia refusing to provide abortion care. This disparity forces an estimated 21 thousand women each year to migrate to another region solely to receive an abortion. The experience of women in post Roe v. Wade United States is eerily similar, with many also forced to cross state borders in order to receive an abortion.
If Meloni ever enacted her proposed extension of the constitution, then Italians seeking abortions will either be forced to leave the country and travel to states which offer the needed care or seek unsafe alternatives with potentially life threatening consequences. A Spanish initiative called European Abortion Access has recorded that thousands of Italian women have travelled to both Spain and England to seek the needed medical help. It’s clear that the current medical structure in Italy is in need of an overhaul when it comes to abortions. In the meantime, the lives, livelihoods, and safety of Italian women hang in the balance of the furthest right Italian government the state has seen since Benito Mussolini.

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