When Giulia, 20, discovered she was pregnant she immediately decided that she wasn’t ready to have a baby. Supported by her boyfriend and family, she sought medical advice in her home town in Italy’s central Marche region on how to obtain an abortion. She faced obstacles at every turn, from telephones not being answered and surgeries being closed, to one doctor who tried to persuade her to change her mind.
Abortion in Italy was legalised in 1978, overturning an outright ban enforced by the fascist dictator Benito Mussolini who deemed it a crime against the Italian race, but the high number of gynaecologists who refuse to terminate pregnancies for moral reasons – 64.6%, according to 2020 data – has meant women still encounter huge difficulties in accessing safe procedures.
Conservative leadership in several Italian regions has in recent years impeded abortion access even further, especially in Marche, a former leftwing bastion, which since September 2020 has been ruled by Brothers of Italy – a party with neofascist roots that after national elections in September could be the largest party in a rightwing governing coalition.
Giorgia Meloni, the party chief who hopes to become prime minister, has described abortion as a “defeat”, although recently said abolishing the 1978 law was not on her agenda.
However, Marche, described as a “laboratory” for Brothers of Italy policies, provides an inkling of what might be to come if the coalition led by the party and including Matteo Salvini’s far-right League, which is equally against abortion, clinches power.
One of the regional council’s first moves was to not apply a health ministry measure, introduced last year, allowing health clinics, not just hospitals, to provide the abortion pill. While national policy stipulates that medical abortions can be carried out up to nine weeks of pregnancy, in Marche the limit is seven weeks. By law, after a woman receives a medical certificate authorising her abortion, she must reflect for a week before the procedure is carried out.
“Sometimes a woman doesn’t discover she is pregnant until the fifth or sixth week,” said Manuela Bora, a regional politician with the centre-left Democratic party. “It’s almost impossible to get an abortion here. Yes, we can’t deny that it was difficult before, but that was due to the moral objectors; now the erosion of abortion rights is a political theme.”
Giulia, the 20-year-old seeking an abortion, in the end went online and found details about AIED, a non-profit family counselling clinic in Ascoli Piceno, almost a two-hour drive from her home, that provides abortion services.
The clinic prepares women for medical or surgical abortions, the latter carried out each Saturday at the local hospital by two non-objector gynaecologists hired from outside the Marche region, who often face the wrath of anti-abortion protesters outside.
The service was contracted out to AIED a decade ago because abortion procedures could no longer be guaranteed by the hospital due to the high number of moral objectors among its staff.
On the same morning as Giulia’s consultation, Tiziana Antonucci, AIED’s vice-president, returns the calls of six other women who recount similar stories of their struggles to access abortion services through the public system. A pregnancy termination through AIED costs €200, money that goes towards funding the service, compared with €1,500 in a privately run clinic.
“The are some hospitals where there are only objectors, and one hospital – in Fermo – has never even applied the abortion law,” said Antonucci. “But even in hospitals where there are no objectors, the service is inadequate. When the left was in power they did nothing to change it, as they feared losing the Catholic vote. Now we have the right, and remain stuck in this increasingly difficult situation.”
The Brothers of Italy-led council has in addition proposed allowing anti-abortion activists, who already infiltrate hospitals to pressure women not to end their pregnancy, to work in family counselling clinics. “Imagine a woman going to a clinic to seek an abortion and finding fanatical people,” said Bora.
Bora herself is all too familiar with the tactics of anti-abortion activists. After clashing with Giorgia Latini, Marche’s equal opportunities councillor, on abortion she received 1,450 nappies – representing the number of abortions in Marche in 2019 – from a doctor, who delivered the consignment to the council offices while his son held up a sign saying she had blood on her hands.
A priority policy for both Brothers of Italy and the League is to reverse Italy’s declining birthrate. One way of achieving that, they believe, is to reduce abortions by providing financial incentives to encourage women to carry through a pregnancy.
“In 2020, when I was elected, there were 2,000 abortions in the region,” said Filippo Saltamartini, Marche’s health councillor. “Could you imagine a square full of this number of children, and their mothers? Mothers who we had helped to provide these children with a home and financial support in their early years. This is the kind of world we need to imagine.”
For some, that imagined world would ideally be pure-blooded Italian. “The Italian population is decreasing. I’m not saying foreigners shouldn’t have children but we need to create the conditions for Italians to reproduce,” said Carlo Ciccioli, the Brothers of Italy group leader in Marche’s council who described abortion as “an absolute rearguard battle” and last year provoked controversy after speaking of “ethnic substitution” of Italian children in schools.
Ciccioli, a doctor, was a member of the youth wing of the Italian Social Movement (MSI), the neofascist party established by a minister in Mussolini’s government that morphed into the National Alliance before becoming Brothers of Italy. In 1974, he shot a political opponent in the leg on a street in Ancona, Marche’s capital.
In other policy changes, the party has cut the region’s sponsorship of Marche gay pride, while the female president of the council’s equal opportunities commission suggested creating conditions for women to work part-time so they could dedicate more time in the kitchen.
A strong sign of a political pivot in the region came on 28 October 2019, when a commemorative dinner was held in Ascoli Piceno to mark the anniversary of Mussolini’s “march on Rome”. The dinner was attended by Francesco Acquaroli, now the president of Marche, along with a host of other Brothers of Italy mayors.
“Marche is a laboratory for Brothers of Italy,” said Paolo Berizzi, a journalist with La Repubblica who has written extensively about the extreme right in Italy. “It’s where the party has done general tests as it prepares for what it could do on a national scale. In two months Italy could be governed by a party that has never really severed links to its fascist history.”
Additional reporting by Pamela Duncan
