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The Italian senate has approved a controversial law that allows anti-abortion activists access to women considering ending their pregnancies.

The development is a “victory” for Giorgia Meloni’s far-right administration, said ABC News, and “revives tensions” around the issue of abortion in Italy, 46 years after it was legalised in the “overwhelmingly Catholic country”. But there are already questions over what impact the new law will actually have.

‘Chips away at rights’

The law, which has already been passed by the lower Chamber of Deputies, allows regions to permit groups “with a qualified experience supporting motherhood” to have access to public support centres where women who are considering abortions receive counselling.

The amendment’s supporters believe it “merely fulfils” the original intent of a 1978 law legalising abortion, known as Law 194, which included provisions to prevent the procedure and support motherhood, but detractors believe it “chips away at abortion rights”.

Access to abortion “remains patchy” in Italy, said the BBC, because of a “high number of medical personnel who identify as ‘conscientious objectors’ and can therefore refuse to perform abortions”. Government data shows that over 63% of gynaecologists are conscientious objectors, while in some southern regions like Sicily and Abruzzo, that percentage “climbs to over 84%”.

‘Ideological flag’

The senate passing the new law has “driven the liberal opposition crazy”, said The New York Times (NYT), but “without actually changing much”. This is because it is “essentially a restatement” of Law 194, which allowed the family counselling centres to “make use of volunteer associations ‘protecting motherhood'” to “help women avoid terminating their pregnancies because of economic, social or family hardships”.

Several groups on both sides of the debate think the measure won’t significantly change anything. “My impression is that it won’t do much”, said Laura Cristofari from the Center for Assistance to Life, while Mirella Parachini, a gynaecologist and an activist for abortion rights, said that the measure was a “proclamation that changes nothing”, and was merely “waving an ideological flag”.

But the move shows Meloni’s “mastery of political messaging”, said the NYT, because “the first Italian prime minister with roots in parties born from the ashes of Fascism” has “assured a once sceptical foreign-policy establishment that she is a trustworthy, more-or-less mainstream partner”.

According to political analysts, the domestic agenda she has pursued since coming to power 18 months ago “still very much fits her longstanding beliefs” and “pleases her traditional base”. During a 2022 interview with the NYT, Meloni said she had a “very deep approach” to the issue because her mother nearly aborted her after her father ran out on the family.

The “new tensions” over abortion in Italy “come against the backdrop of developments elsewhere in Europe going somewhat in the opposite direction”, said ABC News. France marked International Women’s Day in March by “inscribing the guaranteed right to abortion into its constitution”; last year “overwhelmingly Catholic” Malta voted to ease the strictest abortion laws in the EU; and Polish lawmakers have “moved forward” with proposals to lift a near-total ban on abortion.

Meanwhile, Spain’s equality minister has “weighed into the debate prompting a spat” with Meloni, said the BBC. Allowing the “organised harassment” of women in abortion clinics meant “undermining a right recognised by the law”, Ana Redondo wrote on X. She added that it was “the strategy of the extreme right” to “intimidate in order to row back on rights”.

But Meloni “hit back”, saying that “several times I’ve listened to foreign ministers talk about internal Italian matters without knowing the full facts”.