Law 194 on voluntary termination of pregnancy "cannot be touched", continues to repeat the minister of the Family Eugenia Roccella, a proud anti-abortionist.
On the other hand, the Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni herself has repeated it several times.
What makes access to abortion in Italy complicated, however, is not the threat of a change in the law: it is its non-application.
Italy has a chronic problem of conscientious objection of gynecologists and anesthesiologists: according to the latest ministerial report on 194, 69% of gynecologists and 47% of anesthesiologists refuse to perform abortions.
And access to pharmacological abortion, possible within 9 weeks of gestation, is by no means simple.
"The RU486 is one of the testimonies of the backwardness of this country", says Lisa Canitano, a Roman gynecologist who has always fought for the defense of the 194. "The French and the rest of the world have been using it for 30 years. In France they give it even general practitioners who are qualified to do it. In England it is also done electronically, it started with Covid, but now it continues in that direction. We talk to the woman, deciding together with her whether to have a preliminary ultrasound or not. Instead, we implemented it by asking for 3 days of hospitalization," he says.
After the battle for experimentation begun in 2005 by the gynecologist Silvio Viale in Turin and by the radicals, RU486 was marketed in Italy on 10 December 2009: the Italian Medicines Agency (Aifa) authorized the marketing of mifepristone, but with the obligation of hospitalization and to be done within the seventh week of amenorrhea, with tendentially more restrictive procedures.
Only in August 2020 did the new guidelines arrive, issued by the then minister Roberto Speranza: medical abortion is allowed up to the ninth week even on an outpatient basis and in family counseling centres.
But today there are only two regions that distribute the RU486 in consultants (and only in a few): Lazio and Emilia Romagna.
"Pharmacological IVG is regulated by guidelines and is not offered to women in the same way in the various regions", explains Anna Pompili, gynecologist of AMICA, the Italian Contraception and Abortion Doctors Association, to ANSA.
At the regional level, Tuscany is the first region to define the outpatient, extra-hospital administration of the abortion pill in a protocol, followed in 2021 by Lazio.
In the latter region, the RU486 is being distributed experimentally in 6 clinics in Rome and its province.
The other region where pharmacological IVG can actually be accessed on an outpatient basis and in a consulting room is Emilia Romagna.
For now only in Parma, then it will also be possible in Modena, Carpi, Ravenna and Cattolica,
but only within the seventh week and with both pills taken in an outpatient or consultancy setting.
The reference to the week is not unusual because a woman realizes she is pregnant on average 5 weeks from the last menstruation, the 194 protocol provides for a week of reflection after the request for interruption: the time is obviously very limited.
Despite the difficulties, the diffusion of pharmacological abortion increased significantly between 2020 and 2021, in the year of the covid: among the regions that sent ANSA the 2021 IVG data, there was a marked increase in the use of pharmacological abortion, with peaks of 71.5% in the Autonomous Province of Trento.