ESHS/HSS Annual Meeting

‘Abortion is a tragedy, not a crime’: pro-abortion visual discourse in Italy (1956-1981)

• In Event: Representing Pregnancy: Science and Culture in the 20th Century 2

English Abstract

From the mid-1950s, Italy was shaken by a long and polarized campaign for the decriminalization of abortion, which would end some thirty years later. In 1981, a referendum confirmed Law 194/1978, which had decriminalized abortion within the first 12 weeks of pregnancy and under specific and stringent conditions. This paper focuses on the visual pro-abortion discourse and highlights how the dimension of reproductive rights and self-determination was rather weak. Abortion was in fact presented as a ‘violence’ or a ‘tragedy’ (because those who resorted to it were ‘forced’ to give up motherhood) and its decriminalization as a ‘necessary evil’ - which would protect women's health from the risks of back-street abortions.

My analysis will cover the whole campaign, identifying key moments and focusing mainly on the representation of women and female bodies in the press and in the propaganda for the 1981 referendum. I will also analyse the pros and cons of this visual discourse: on the one hand it contributed to morally legitimising abortion, by emotionally mobilising a wide audience that was not necessarily sensitive to the issue of reproductive rights; on the other hand, it contributed to weakening the reproductive agency of women seeking an abortion – by portraying them as victims – and consolidated a doloristic idea of abortion, unrelated to any form of right or claim and still present in the country today.

Author

• Azzurra Tafuro, University of Padua