Objecting to objection: Abortion in Italy

Just passing on a link to an article in the New York Times, “On Paper, Italy Allows Abortions, but Few Doctors Will Perform Them.”  This was from back in January, but came across my twitter or facebook feed the other day.

[A]bortion within 90 days of pregnancy — and later for women in mental or physical danger, or in cases of serious fetal pathologies — has been legal in this country for over three decades.

But that does not mean that finding a doctor to perform one is easy. Seventy percent of gynecologists — up to 83 percent in some conservative southern regions — are conscientious objectors to the law, and do not perform abortions for religious or personal reasons in a country that remains, culturally at least, overwhelmingly Catholic. . . .

According to a recent report, about 60 percent of Italian hospitals perform abortions, a declining but “more than satisfactory” number, the minister of health, Beatrice Lorenzin, wrote in a statement.

The article features women who had to travel “long” distances (the one instance with specifics was a 30 mile trip) or call up multiple hospitals to find a doctor willing to perform an abortion, and laments that “in a predominantly Catholic country, the sense of guilt for women who get abortions is still very strong.”

Of course, it should go without saying that what the New York Times thinks is a terrible situation, I think is very encouraging to read.

image by Carin Araujo, http://www.prtc.net/~carin (Stock.xchng #197853) [Copyrighted free use], via Wikimedia Commons