Where do we stand? 45 years of academic literature, scientific reports and public debate on the implementation of the abortion right in Italy

Over the last few decades, there has been no shortage of debate on reproductive rights and, in particular, on the right to abortion in Western countries. However, it is above all in recent years that the spotlight has turned back on their (lack of) effectiveness, also due to recent events, such as the ruling of the Supreme Court of the United States or that of the Constitutional Court in Poland against abortion. In Italy, Law 194/78 has guaranteed the right to abortion since 1978 and, in compliance with national guidelines and minimum service standards, the organisation and provision of abortion services were decentralised to a regional level immediately after its approval. In recent years, however, the public debate about the right to abortion has reignited due to some questionable choices made by some Regional Councils in the organisation of these services, the worsening of some critical phenomena with respect to the access to the abortion service (such as the prevalence of objecting doctors in national health facilities) and the ambiguous positions of the new right-wing government majority on the topic. Taken together, we believe these elements make it necessary to seriously reflect on the state of the right to abortion in the country. It seems that Italian academic literature has not paid much attention to the right to abortion and its path over time, both in terms of public debate and in terms of (in)efficiency of the service. In particular, the legal literature has been interested in the topic from the point of view of the self-rule/shared rule issue, while the political literature has neglected the topic both in terms of politics and policy. Given this, we believe that a systematic review of the academic and scientific literature produced since the approval of law 194/78 and a reconstruction of the public debate are a necessary precondition for understanding the (political and non-political) obstacles which currently jeopardise abortion services in Italy. This work, therefore, aims to carry out such review by dividing it into three parts. A first part in which the legal, political and sociological literature - especially the Italian one - which has variously dealt with the right to abortion in the country will be collected, organised and systematised; a second part in which we will focus on the evolution of the provision of abortion services at a regional level, by diachronically analysing the reports of the Italian Ministry of Health starting from 1980; and, finally, a third part aimed at reconstructing the terms of the public debate regarding the right to abortion to understand how and how much they have changed over time.