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CTV News
3 days ago
- General
- CTV News
Sicily requires hospitals to hire doctors who perform abortions
Italy's Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni attends the European Political Community summit in Tirana, Albania, Friday, May 16, 2025. (AP Photo/Vlasov Sulaj) ROME - Sicily has passed a law requiring public hospitals to hire doctors who do not object to performing abortions, amid difficulties across Italy in accessing terminations. The measure was adopted by the assembly of the right-wing-led regional authority on Tuesday, in what its main proponent described as a 'historic moment'. Abortion has been legal in Italy since 1978 but doctors can refuse to perform the procedure by citing conscientious objections. In practice, this means abortion access can be difficult in many areas of the Catholic-majority country -- including in Sicily. Of the 55 hospitals on the island with a gynaecology department, abortion is performed in 47 percent of them, below the national average of 61 percent, according to Italy's health ministry. In 2022, 61 percent of all gynaecologists across Italy were conscientious objectors, rising to 81.5 percent in Sicily. The law change was proposed by Dario Safina, a member of the regional assembly for the centre-left Democratic Party, who hailed it as a 'historic moment'. 'Our goal is that the right to abortion is real, not just theoretical,' he wrote on Facebook. 'With this rule, we lay the foundation for a health system that is fairer, more efficient and respectful of the rights of all,' he added. Italy's far-right Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni opposes abortion but has said she will not change the law. However, critics accuse her of trying to make it more complicated to obtain one.
Local Italy
15-02-2025
- Politics
- Local Italy
Inside Italy: Why government silence is bad news ahead of Italy's citizenship referendum
Inside Italy is our weekly look at some of the news, talking points and gossip from Italy that you might not have heard about. It's published each Saturday and members can receive it directly to their inbox, by going to their newsletter preferences or adding their email to the sign-up box in this article. Italian citizenship has been a heavily discussed topic in national media outlets and TV talk shows in recent weeks after the Italian Constitutional Court approved a landmark referendum on easing citizenship by residency rules. The referendum, which is set to take place on an as-yet-unspecified Sunday between April 15th and June 15th, will ask Italians to decide on whether or not to create a quicker path to naturalisation by cutting the current 10-year wait time down to five years. This would bring Italy – which is often regarded as having one of the toughest naturalisation systems in Europe – in line with countries such as the UK, France and Germany. But while a broad centre-left coalition including the Partito Democratico (PD), Alleanza Verdi e Sinistra (AVS), Italia Viva and +Europa has recently begun to run a joint campaign in support of the proposed citizenship reform, the ruling hard-right coalition has largely avoided any public mention of the referendum in recent weeks. Granted, right-wing leaders including PM Giorgia Meloni clearly expressed their opposition to changing current citizenship rules after referendum campaigners secured the signatures needed to qualify for a national vote last September. But ever since Italy's highest court greenlighted the vote in late January, the forces making up the ruling bloc (Meloni's Fratelli d'Italia, Deputy PM Matteo Salvini's Lega and Antonio Tajani's Forza Italia) have hardly ever touched on the issue in interviews with media or in parliament – and that may well be by design. Earlier this week, we reported on how the proposed citizenship reform faces two major hurdles, with the first one being the so-called quorum (or 'threshold'). As is the case with all abrogative referendums in Italy, voter turnout will need to exceed 50 percent for the vote's result to be valid. This means that, out of around 51 million eligible voters, over 25.5 million will need to take part in the vote. If this quorum is not met, the referendum won't be valid, whatever its result may be. Avoiding (or minimising) public discourse has long been one of the most common political strategies in Italy to keep referendums from reaching the quorum. In other words, rather than actively campaigning 'against' a certain proposal, parties choose to sidestep the issue altogether, discouraging participation in the vote in a bid to ensure that it doesn't reach the required turnout. This tactic is often seen by political commentators as partly responsible for the low number of successful referendums held in Italy since the birth of the Republic (only 39 of 77 votes have reached the quorum over the past 50 years). Over the years, many campaign groups and political experts have called for the repeal of the quorum requirement, asking that referendums' results be taken as valid regardless of voter turnout. None have been successful so far. So what does it all mean for the citizenship referendum? It means that the campaign run by the centre-left coalition will have to 'drown out' the silence of the ruling bloc in order to give the proposed citizenship reform a chance of passing at least the first hurdle – namely the quorum. Some Italian media reports in recent weeks have said that a miracolo (miracle) is needed for the referendum to reach the required voter turnout. Plenty of religious miracoli have taken place in Italy over the centuries, at least according to Catholic tradition. Hopefully, we'll be getting a slightly more secular miracle this spring.
