At one hospital, doctors advised her to get a psychiatrist’s note saying she had threatened to kill herself, so that she could extend the legal time limit. At another, a doctor suggested that she just wait.
“‘The foetus is incompatible with life; you will very likely lose it anyway past the 20th week’ — that’s what this doctor told me,” Ms Benedetta said, still angry and incredulous. She asked that her last name not be used to protect her privacy. “To expect a woman to see her belly growing, to raise a doomed life, is inhumane.”
“I felt like a container, not a human being,” she added.
After a fight that feminists in Italy still consider a signal achievement, abortion within 90 days of pregnancy — and later for women in mental or physical danger or in cases of serious foetal 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. 70 per cent of gynaecologists — up to 83 per cent 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 Roman Catholic.
It is a circumstance that has alarmed some women’s health experts, who say that the challenges will grow only more severe in the years ahead.
“Most of the non-objectors like me are about to retire, so we will soon have troubles helping these women,” said Dr Silvana Agatone, a 62-year-old gynaecologist at a hospital in Rome and the founder of a website that provides information on how and where to get an abortion.
Dr Agatone has conducted a phone survey, calling every hospital obstetrician unit she could locate to verify whether their doctors were conscientious objectors, and found that only 1,200 gynaecologists out of well over 10,000 in Italy performed abortions.
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