Imagine having to go to an unknown address for an important appointment. If the navigator of your car were to abandon you before arriving at your destination, would it be of any use to know that you are in the right city? With the necessary distinctions, the comparison effectively returns the idea of the obstacles that women intending to resort to a voluntary interruption of pregnancy (IVG) still have to face in our country.
A service that should be guaranteed homogeneously throughout the territory but which, 44 years after the entry into force of law 194, still is not. To begin with, the most recent ministerial survey, relating to the year 2019, reports that only one gynecologist out of three practices the termination of pregnancy. Who they are and where they operate is not known since the Ministry makes available closed data, aggregated by Region and above all two years old. That is an enormity considering the massive generational change underway among healthcare professionals. And so there are many, many women forced to rely on word of mouth or to make real pilgrimages from structure to structure before finding a non-objector gynecologist.
The abortion law turns 44, but data on objectors do not arrive from many hospitals
by Viola Rita
Underlining the impossibility of consulting data that should be in the public domain are Chiara Lalli and Sonia Montegiove who, between August 2021 and April 2022, contacted all Italian hospitals in an attempt to objectively photograph the phenomenon. Their investigation, with a deliberately provocative title (Never data), was published earlier this month by Fandango Libri. «We left to satisfy a concrete need: a national monitoring of the structures that carry out voluntary interruptions of pregnancy. However, amidst delays and non-responses from hospitals, as well as the receipt of partial or contradicting data, the map was already born old “, begins Lalli, journalist and medical historian, underlining how the investigation ended up taking on a political objective: to put pressure on this data to be really made available to citizens.
«The regional percentages communicated by the Ministry are of little use. Let’s take the situation in Molise as an example: in 2019, according to the ministerial survey, 82.8% of doctors were objectors “sums up Lalli and then reveals that, based on the data provided by the regional health agency, 27 out of 29 gynecologists are conscientious objectors and the rest work in the same Campobasso facility. “This means that in the rest of the region it is not possible to terminate a pregnancy. Not a small detail for the woman who has to use it ». The authors have requested to be able to consult the complete database to the same Ministry, without obtaining a reply. «Knowledge of the service offer is a fundamental condition in the decision-making process of a woman who evaluates the termination of pregnancy. The lack of transparency on hospitals that practice IVG forces many Italians to try their hand at a real treasure hunt, forcing them to repeatedly suffer judgments and social stigma. Not to mention the lost time »says Lalli.
Denied abortion has consequences for the health of women and families
of Deborah Amery
Kept in some servers, these data already exist: the structures are required to communicate them quarterly to the Ministry, which in turn should draw up an annual report. It would only be a matter of making them available to the public. «The main problem is the lack of interest in politics. In many cases, Law 194 remains unapplied because abortion has now been de-classified as a purely moral issue. But is not so. It is time to move the discussion to the professional duties of doctors »concludes Lalli.