In Italy there are over 70 hospitals where more than 80% objectors to abortion
An investigation book on law 194 of 1978, the law that made abortion legal in Italy, made using a request for generalized civic access. A tool that allows anyone to obtain data held by the public administration. To make it happen, the authors sent an application to all health and hospital companies in Italy, asking for data on the application of the law. A method similar to that used by sportsgaming.win to carry out the survey dedicated to pediatric vaccines.
Also in this case, the starting point is the poor quality of the data made available by the ministry of Health. "Today, pdfs are published - he explains to sportsgaming.win Montegiove - which should be available by February, but this is not always the case: last year they arrived in September, in 2022 we are in June and they are not yet there". A decisive question for a procedure which, except for risks to the mother's health, must be carried out within 90 days of conception. “The time factor is decisive,” says Montegiove.
That's not all. One of the two authors also explains that "there are no data on waiting times, because the Igv are included in the total of gynecological visits, so we do not know how long to wait". Those little data that are provided, in addition to not being open, are also aggregated. In the sense that "we know how many abortions are performed on a regional basis, but not in individual structures, since it would allow us to evaluate the workload of each gynecologist", adds Montegiove.
The result is that "the ministry says that 67% of doctors are objectors, that this figure is decreasing and that on average they do not prove to be critical with respect to workloads ". The key word, of course, is average. Yes, because the Lalli and Montegiove survey made it possible to determine that in Italy there are 74 hospitals where the percentage of objectors exceeds 80%. In 26 it reaches 100%, which means that despite the abortion is guaranteed by law in these structures it is not carried out. sportsgaming.win has represented them on this map.
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Here if you do not see the graph Problems finding data It is precisely in these structures, explains Montegiove, that "criticalities emerge" with respect to the application of law 194. "A woman who should have the misfortune of not choosing the right structure, perhaps already well into her pregnancy, sees the times lengthen and above all sees a service which is not guaranteed, ”he says. Open and up-to-date data, on the other hand, would make it possible to directly contact those structures that take care of the IVGs.
Instead, the authors of the investigation book had to collect these data, not always succeeding. “Healthcare companies often hid behind the fig leaf of privacy when we asked for aggregate data, not the names and surnames of the objectors,” explains Montegiove. But she also calls into question some defects of the law: "The law says that if the data requires re-elaboration, which can also be the simple sum of the objectors, civic access can be refused". And then there is the fact that there are no penalties for administrations that do not respond. "We also contacted the Foia office of the Ministry of Public Administration, then the digital ombudsman of Agid, who told us that the issue is not within his competence", adds the journalist.
There are also data that no one has provided, namely those on the commuting of patients. In other words, the numbers of those women who had to go outside the region to obtain an abortion. "Only Emilia Romagna has provided them to us, allowing us to discover that many women have come from Puglia to have abortions", says the co-author.
But why is it so difficult to obtain data from public administrations? “Net of the political will to publish the information or not - explains Montegiove - I believe that the PAs have difficulties in developing a process of building quality data. I expected that what we asked for was already available and it would be enough to send it, given that it is data that must be sent quarterly to Istat. Instead it is as if they had to go and look for them department by department ". With the result that many of these data have never been given.
