Posted by ccld201
5 May 2026Between the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, concerns about abortion grew considerably in Italy. This transformation was neither rapid nor linear: it was the product of ideological tensions, nationalist pressures, medical and religious interests that intertwined in complex ways for nearly a century, culminating in the approval of Law 194 in 1978. Retracing this history means understanding not only where we come from, but also how far the fundamental question of female self-determination remains unresolved.
Growing concerns: demography, nation, and the body
In June 1910, «Il Policlinico»[1] carried a detailed report on a congress of French general practitioners dedicated to the question of non-therapeutic induced abortion. The demographer Jacques Bertillon estimated that criminal abortions in Paris amounted to over fifty thousand a year; the criminologist Alexandre Lacassagne counted over nineteen thousand cases in Lyon alone. The discussion closed on a unanimous position: non-therapeutic induced abortion must always be considered a crime. This was not strictly a medical debate: it was already entirely political.
In Italy, during the same years, the reproductive sphere was shifting with growing speed towards the public and state domain. The liberal bourgeoisie gradually gained awareness of the fact that procreation and motherhood were mainly political issues. The fight against induced abortion gained legitimacy through the anti-Malthusian debate — denoting opposition to Malthusian population theory, particularly to the argument that fertility limitation is a social or moral necessity — while the demographic problem explicitly emerged in public discourse during the 1910s. The climate radicalised sharply with the Italo-Turkish war and with the colonial campaign in Libya of 1911–12: fertility became a prime issue within the new theoretical framework linked to nationalistic imperialism. The sociologist Corrado Gini argued that the state needed to intervene with radical measures against depopulation. The discursive shift was thus completed and the founding terms that Fascism would subsequently make its own were born: race, number, and power.
The Fascist regime: motherhood as patriotic duty
In the mid-1920s, the Fascist regime initiated a pronatalist policy that led to an unprecedented emphasis on the exclusively procreative function of the female role and body, and on the configuration of motherhood as a patriotic duty. Demographic power became the undisputed protagonist of the Penal Code of 1930. Title X of the Code —«Crimes against the Integrity and Health of the Race» (Delitti contro l’integrità e la sanità della stirpe) — represented one of the most explicit expressions of Fascist biopolitical legislation. Introduced with the Penal Code of 1930, it subsumed abortion, incitement to abortion, and related reproductive offences under the category of crimes against the demographic interest of the state. The object of legal protection was no longer the individual — neither the woman nor the unborn child — but the nation conceived as a racial and demographic entity. No fewer than eleven articles regulated abortion practices, incitement to abortion, induced impotence, and venereal disease. At the same time, the Catholic Church — through Pope Pius XI’s encyclical Casti connubii (1930) — developed a discourse on conjugal morality and sexual discipline that was to have a lasting influence across a very wide public space. Catholic hierarchies regularly embraced a vocabulary that explicitly linked procreation to nationhood.
Despite such meticulous penal articulation, abortion practices maintained traces of continuity with the past. The extreme difficulty of retrieving the main piece of evidence — the aborted foetus — and of obtaining a full confession made convictions hard to secure. The Fascist regime’s totalitarian aspirations to discipline reproductive behaviour were very often frustrated: the birth rate continued to decrease. As the historian Perry Willson has noted, Fascist gender ideology hinged around the pronatalist demographic campaign, yet the Fascist authorities were fully aware that induced abortions dominated in the upper as well as the lower classes.[2]
The Republican phase and Law 194/1978
The Rocco Code remained in force after 1946 and the adoption of the new constitution, impacting the newborn Republic with harsh penal control over women’s reproductive behaviour and configuring motherhood as a duty and a destiny. To identify a turning point in the contemporary history of clandestine abortion we must look at the transition from the 1960s to the 1970s, when feminist movements pushed all Western societies towards a radical revision of anti-abortion laws. In France, the Veil law was approved in 1975; the US Supreme Court ruling of 1973, Roe v. Wade, represented a crucial precedent, though one subsequently overturned by Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization in 2022.
In Italy, a Constitutional Court ruling proved decisive too. Ruling no. 27 of 1975 — a dry and concise judgment focused exclusively on protecting the right to health, women’s health included, as guaranteed by Article 32 of the Italian Constitution — marked a genuine discontinuity with the past. The ruling created the conditions for, and pointed towards, the extraordinarily difficult compromise among political forces of varied — including Catholic — inspiration, achieved under the shared banner of the constitutional right to health. As a result, on 13 April 1978, the Chamber of Deputies approved Law 194 with 308 votes in favour and 275 against. Through its Article 22, Law 194/1978 formally repealed Title X of Book II of the Penal Code, decriminalising voluntary termination of pregnancy under specific conditions and in the name of the constitutional right to health. It legalised abortion on request within the first trimester and for therapeutic reasons thereafter, while introducing the right to conscientious objection for health personnel. Notably, however, Law 194/1978 does not recognise women’s right to self-determination as a founding principle. Its ambiguous title — Norms on the Social Protection of Motherhood and the Voluntary Termination of Pregnancy — reflects the historical compromises that shaped both its provisions and its scope. The Communist politician Giovanni Berlinguer, one of the Law’s rapporteurs for the majority (relatore di maggioranza), predicted its troubled fate from the outset: no country had so far managed to produce a satisfactory law on abortion, and Italy, he feared, would be no exception.
Self-determination and its limits
In the aftermath of the failed abrogative referendum of 1981 — in which 88.5% voted against the Radical Party’s liberalizing proposal and 67.9% rejected the Pro-Life Movement’s restrictive one — the historian Gianna Pomata offered a searching observation: while the feminist demand concerning abortion had claimed women’s right to the autonomous control of reproduction, the law granted abortion as a special benefit for those women unable to cope with the maternal role.[3] Abortion was thus transformed from a general question of principle — symbolically, women’s right to self-determination — into a specific request, acceptable within the framework of the general social protection of motherhood. Self-determination and liberation practices remained intricate knots that have yet to be unravelled.
Conscientious objection today
Forty years after its approval, what had instantly appeared to be Law 194’s most problematic aspect — conscientious objection by medical staff — had become even more diffused. The 2018 report of the Ministry of Health recorded an objection rate of 68.4% among gynaecologists, 45.6% among anaesthetists, and 38.9% among non-medical staff. That same year, the European Committee of Social Rights denounced shortcomings in health care provision for women resorting to the voluntary interruption of pregnancy, limited access to abortion services, regional disparity, and discrimination against non-objecting doctors subjected to moral harassment. These developments occurred at a historical moment that saw the reemergence of renewed forms of nationalism that, through a traditional regulation of reproductive bodies and family hierarchy, reproposed the entirely imagined idea of a homogeneous community.
The most up-to-date figures on conscientious objection to Law 194/1978 on voluntary termination of pregnancy (known in Italian as interruzione volontaria di gravidanza IVG) date back to 2022 and are contained in the Annual Report submitted by the Ministry of Health to Parliament with considerable delay relative to the statutory deadline of February of the year following the reference period. Under the terms of the law, the Report covering 2022 data should have been presented to Parliament by February 2023; it was instead transmitted only in 2024, with a two-year delay. This chronic pattern of late reporting significantly hampers public scrutiny and evidence-based policy evaluation, as the most recently available official figures are, at the time of writing, already two years old.
In 2022, 60.5% of gynaecologists working in public hospitals and accredited private facilities declared conscientious objection, a slight decrease from 63.6% in 2021. Lower rates were recorded among anaesthetists (44.6%) and non-medical staff (36.2%). Marked regional disparities persist: with regard to service provision, only 357 out of 560 hospitals with an obstetrics and/or gynaecology ward performed terminations, corresponding to 63.8% of the total.
Law 194/1978 under the Meloni Government
Georgia Meloni’s approach to Law 194/1978 has been characterised by a studied ambiguity. At the rhetorical level, her government has consistently disclaimed any intention to repeal or formally amend the Law, thereby positioning itself as respectful of an established legal and social settlement. In practice, however, a number of policy measures introduced since October 2022 have been widely interpreted by reproductive rights advocates and legal scholars as constituting a de facto erosion of access to termination services, without recourse to explicit legislative reform.
The most debated initiative has been the government’s encouragement of anti-abortion associations — operating under the broad umbrella of pro-vita movements — to gain access to the community clinics (consultori familiari), which were originally established by a 1975 law (n. 405) to provide reproductive health services, including contraception, pregnancy care, and family planning. These clinics have already seen their capacity systematically eroded by successive governments through chronic underfunding and institutional neglect. Critics have argued that this measure effectively introduces an additional layer of ideological pressure at a structurally vulnerable point in the IVG pathway, disproportionately affecting women who are already socially or economically marginalised.
More broadly, the emphasis placed by Meloni and members of her coalition on the first part of Law 194/1978 — its provisions on the social protection of motherhood and the discouragement of abortion as a primary policy goal — has been read by some scholars as a strategic reframing: one that shifts the law’s normative centre of gravity from reproductive autonomy towards a pro-natalist conception of the state’s role in reproductive life. Whether this reframing constitutes a coherent policy agenda or remains primarily a discursive posture is a question that the scholarly literature has not yet fully resolved, not least because its concrete effects remain difficult to disentangle from pre-existing structural barriers, including the persistently high rates of conscientious objection documented above.
Conclusion: the right not to be compelled into motherhood
Writing in 1988, the jurist and legal philosopher Luigi Ferrajoli offered a broadly positive assessment of Law 194/1978, arguing that it had proved effective precisely because its preventive and deterrent provisions — though ultimately inoperative in practice — had been superseded by a de facto libertarian interpretation, advanced by women invoking the principle of bodily autonomy and immunity from coercive intervention.
For Ferrajoli, the divergence between the letter of the law and its actual implementation illustrated a broader truth about criminal law as a symbolic order: one whose normative force depends less on its textual content than on the meanings attributed to it in practice.[4] This gap, rather than undermining the law, created an opportunity to move beyond mere defence of its existing provisions, i.e. towards full decriminalisation of abortion and the constitutional entrenchment of women’s reproductive freedom, grounded in the principle of personal inviolability enshrined in Article 13 of the Italian Constitution.
Central to Ferrajoli’s argument is a conceptual distinction that remains unresolved in contemporary debate. He contended that framing women’s reproductive autonomy as a “right to abortion” constitutes a fundamental misrepresentation. The right at stake is not primarily a positive liberty — a faculty to perform a given act — but rather a negative immunity: the right not to be compelled into motherhood against one’s will. In this sense, the criminal prohibition of abortion does not merely restrict a behaviour; it imposes a condition. Women’s right to self-determination should therefore be understood, in Ferrajoli’s terms, as a habeas corpus — a constitutionally guaranteed freedom from coercion — rather than as a mere entitlement to terminate a pregnancy.
Alessandra Gissi is an Associate professor in Contemporary History at the Department of Human and Social Sciences, University of Naples L’Orientale. She co-authored with P Stelliferi, P. (2023) L’aborto. Una storia, Rome, Carocci (English translation forthcoming: History of Abortion in Italy: From Fascism to Present (Routledge, September 2026).
Read her other post in this series: Reproductive governance in the 21st Century, Abortion law as the litmus test for democracy.
[1] G. Baccelli – F. Durante, Al Congresso dei pratici francesi, in «Il Policlinico», 17, 1910, 24, p. 761.
[2] P. Willson, Women in Twentieth-Century Italy, London – New York, Palgrave Macmillan, 2010, p. 62.
[3] G. Pomata, Ex voto. I risultati dei referendum sull’aborto e la partecipazione politica delle donne, in «il Mulino», 30, 1981, 277, p. 656.
[4] Ferrajoli, Luigi (2010): “Diritti fondamentali e bioetica. La questione dell’embrione”, in S. Rodotà, M. Tallacchini (eds), Ambito e fonti del biodiritto, in Trattato di biodiritto, dir. S. Rodotà, P. Zatti, I, Giuffrè, Milano, 2010, pp. 231-257.