Local Anti-Abortion Strategy in Italy and Measures to Counteract It: The Case of Bergamo

On November 11, 2022, the Women Council Assembly of the city of Bergamo was presented with a participation request submitted by the association Provita & Famiglia Onlus (Prolife and Profamily Non-Profit Organization). Before voting, the members of the council had the chance to express their support or refusal of said request and many highlighted the complexity of the situation. Even though the values and politics of the non-profit were defined questionable at best, turning down the application would have meant discarding the basic democratic process aiming at fostering the dialogue among civic factions and guaranteeing the freedom of expression to every member of society. The vote resulted in five “yes,” eleven “no,” and sixteen abstensions; Provita & Famiglia Onlus won’t be a part of Bergamo’s Women Council for the time being. Right-wing city council members and representatives of the non-profit itself decried the denial as a despicable attack to the freedom of speech on the part of the left and condemned the persecution against Catholics seemingly underway in Italy. The narrative of Christians being victims of a leftist ideology, increasingly used also in Italy, is widely inspired by the discourse that the US Religious Right has implemented since its inception at the end of the 1970s. The Women Council assembly was being held less than five months after the United States’ Supreme Court decided in the case Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organisation that the power to regulate access to abortion belongs to each single state of the Union, substantially overturning the 1973 landmark decision in Roe v. Wade. On that same day, in Bergamo, one of the main movie theatres in town had closed its doors to the public in order to host a private screening of the anti-abortion movie “Unplanned.” This paper presents the activity, the social media outreach, and the narrative deployed by the organization Provita & Famiglia Onlus and its supporters, both in the political sphere and in the civic society, in the aftermath of the latest political election which saw the victory of the right-wing party Fratelli d’Italia led by Giorgia Meloni. Now Prime Minister of the country, on various occasions, Meloni declared her pride in being woman, a mother, and a Christian. She never hid her ties to European right-wing figures, such as Viktor Orban, and US ones, by participating in the CPAC conference, and she is now arguably one of the faces of the so-called populist right international. Elaborating on the data collected by women’s rights associations such as Non una di meno (No Woman Left Behind), the paper also presents the strategies of the current war against women’s emancipation, that is being waged at the local level and in subtle ways that make it increasingly effective precisely because it remains mostly covert. Data collected through participant observation will allow to shed light on the narrative spread by anti-abortion campaigners and how this can be efficiently counteracted by other civic organisations.