Pro-life Movements and Activists Dealing with Birth Control. Lessons from an Italian Fieldwork

In Italy, all pro-life movements, even when they deny it, are Catholic inspired, if not directly linked to the Roman Church. For this reason during my fieldwork I never met a prolife activist who was not a very devoted and conservative churchgoer. This means that these movements and activists have to deal with the Church doctrine about abortion AND about birth control, and that can put them in a difficult position both as a movement and as individuals. As prolife movements they have to face a common conundrum: If you are against abortion, why are you not promoting birth control? This is a question that they often have to ask. And they can not simply answer “because the Church is against the pill” because they do not want to present themselves as religious movements since they defend the idea that abortion is an ethical issue that goes beyond faith. As individuals they have to deal with the fact that an abortion is something you do not have (no matter what the circumstances are), but also with the fact that they do not want to have a lot of children, which is something that might happen to you when you only use “natural methods” as the Church recommends. We will show in this paper how these movements politicise the question of birth control (and therefore sexuality, meaning of course heterosexual sexuality, which is the only one they can imagine) and the conflicts that exist inside the prolife world about this subject. We will also show how individuals within the movement, and especially women, deal with their own sexuality and birth control, which they consider not a merely personal, but a political question.