Health Care, Reproductive Self-Determination and moral repugnance in the legal discourse on abortion

Abstract

The US Supreme Court’s decision in Dobbs v. Jackson Women's Health Organization has brought the debate on abortion at the center of the public and scholarly attention once again. In Italy abortion is regulated by legislation since 1978, but can abortion be considered a fundamental and autonomous right? Can we talk about reproductive self-determination? After a brief overview on the Italian legal framework on abortion and its place inside the international law standard, the chapter aims at analyzing the Italian rules on the expansion of the use of RU486 pill, enacted in 2020, as a path of pharmacological abortion. The chapter will focus on some collateral elements, and on some specific contrasting and concurring rights - different from the traditional ones (the father’s one to parenthood or family life and the fetus’ one to life) - which can encourage or discourage the access to abortion: welfare instruments and procedure to ensure informed consent to the treatment; anti-abortion advertising campaigns and freedom of speech and publishing; conscientious objector doctors’ right. Through deductive and inductive method on relevant legislation, through statistical data on access to abortion and to RU486 in Italy, We propose a possible re-enactment on how the above mentioned “collateral elements” affect woman’s intimate choice and reproductive self-determination, mining or not the effectiveness of the law rules and of the rights protected and of woman’s health. Assuming that the law in the western legal tradition is the instrument to protect values and rights, to perpetuate moral repugnance or to embrace different and new paradigms, in our conclusions we will propose a “secular and lay perspective” on the matter, according to theories on the sovereignty on the body and procreative rights, having regard to the possibility to improve the public debate by providing concrete information about the advantages in terms of efficiency of choices considered morally problematic and the chance that such approach could ensure more effectiveness of the rights involved.