The Italian government could give 1,000 euros a month to economically disadvantaged women who choose not to have an abortion.
A bill, which is due to be tabled in the coming days, would award the monthly payments for five years to women who would have terminated their pregnancies due to financial hardship. Women who are on low household incomes and who are Italian citizens residing in Italy will qualify for the measures, Corriere della Sera reports.
The bill, tabled by senator Maurizio Gasparri, who leads the Senate delegation of the centre-right Forza Italia party, will create a 600 million euro fund at the Ministry of Economy to finance the policy.
It also states that counselling centres, in addition to guaranteeing the necessary medical checks, should help women find solutions to economic or social problems that could lead them to consider terminating their pregnancies.
While Italy currently offers help to couples who wish to have children, Gasparri said this was nowhere near enough “to stem the use of voluntary termination of pregnancy for reasons of economic and social hardship.”
“It is therefore necessary to mobilise resources and find solutions to support pregnant women in order to discourage abortion for reasons of economic and social disadvantage,” he said.
The initiative comes a month after Italian prime minister Giorgia Meloni successfully lobbied to remove a reference to “safe and legal abortion” from the final statement of the G7 summit in southern Italy.
“Meloni is against abortion and always has been, so that was her red line and honestly we pushed early on. But when the presidency said ‘no’ that was that,” an anonymous European diplomat told Reuters.
