Contesting Abortion Rights in Contemporary Italy: Discourses and Practices of Pro-life Activism

In this chapter, I analyse the strategies and discourses used in pro- life activism to challenge abortion, based on ethnographic research conducted in Northern Italy between 2009 and 2013. In the first part, I reconstruct the emergence of the Italian pro-life movement in the years when abortion was legalised, and briefly describe its practices and protest logics. In the second part, I focus on the two dominant discourses of contemporary pro-life activism: one that centres on the embryos/foetuses as ‘unborn children’ and another that centres on women (and men) as ‘victims of abortion’. I therefore take into consideration the burial of abortion remains and post-abortion healing as practices based, respectively, on the first and the second discourse. Both are carried out by organisations that, despite being close to the pro-life movement, are not part of it. I will argue that such practices, which both stem from Catholicism, are based on specific cultural constructions of subjectivity, guilt and pain associated with abortion. The burial of embryo and foetal remains and the paths for healing are not only aimed at the ‘salvation’ of maternal and foetal subjects, but are also strategies to oppose the law. For pro-lifers, the funerals for ‘unborn children’ and the testimonies of women and men wounded by abortion serve as moral injunctions to influence social policies and individual behaviours, contesting the idea that abortion is a right.