When Pro-Life Activists Substitute the Welfare State. The Role of Pregnancy Crisis Centres in Italy

This Paper is based on ethnographic participant observations that I had been carrying in two Italian pregnancy crisis centres in 2014-2015 (there are more then 300 of these centres in the country). The centres are run by prolife activists, all catholic and mostly women, and receive women facing unwanted, unexpected or difficult pregnancies. The original goal of the centres was to persuade these women not to have an abortion. But, in a context of economic crisis and luck of public policies supporting low-income families, these centres became a place where poor women, mostly migrants and not wanting to interrupt their pregnancy, come to seek help: baby supplies, food and in some cases more substantial help like a place to stay. But this help come with a price: women have to commit to a pathway of counselling with the prolife volunteers running the centres. During these one-to-one meetings prolife volunteers define how a “good” pregnant women in need must behave by giving advice and by controlling or condemning women’s conduct. This way, the volunteers politicize the pregnancies of the women that they counsel and make them a symbol of their prolife fight. It’s 100 of these women, and the children that they gave birth to, that the prolife organization running the centres brought to it’s first papal audience with Pope Francis in 2014 as a symbol of their “action for life”. In a context characterized by austerity measures, these prolife religious organizations end up dealing with one of the most vulnerable group: poor, migrant (sometime undocumented) pregnant women. They substitute at least in part public policies and use these women’s pregnancies for their political public image.