At 8am on a Friday morning in winter, the road to the San Pio hospital in Benevento, a small city in southern Italy, is covered by mist. The hospital’s corridors are quiet, except on the second floor, where abortion-related visits are scheduled to start.
More than 40 years after abortions were legalised in Italy, they remain hard for women to access – especially in the south, where most doctors refuse to perform them. In 2017, the entire Benevento province was briefly left with no abortion provider after the only non-refuser at the San Pio hospital retired.
Today, abortion services are available only two days a week. On each of those days, every week, another obstacle awaits women: local activists connected to an international network of so-called ‘crisis pregnancy centres’, which seek to reach women considering abortions and stop them from making that choice.
