Italy tussles with allies over G-7 abortion reference, diplomats say

BARI, Italy – Italy has demanded that reference to “safe and legal abortion” be removed from the final statement of this week’s Group of Seven (G-7) summit, diplomats said on June 13.

A senior US official said US President Joe Biden had pushed back at the request and it was not clear if a diplomatic fudge would be needed to overcome the impasse.

The 2023 G-7 communique released after the leaders’ summit in Hiroshima, Japan, which hosted the event in 2023, called for “access to safe and legal abortion and post-abortion care”.

Similar or slightly tougher language was proposed by French and Canadian diplomats during the habitual negotiations that took place ahead of the 2024 meeting, which is being hosted by Italy’s national conservative Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni.

“All the other countries backed them, but it was a red line for Meloni so it is absent from the final text,” one diplomat told Reuters.

Ms Meloni’s office has said that no nation had asked to remove “abortion-related issues” from the draft conclusions and Italy’s Foreign Minister Antonio Tajani said negotiations were continuing.

“Different delegations are discussing this so it is premature to make analyses and useless to make predictions now. We will see at the end what the agreement will be,” Mr Tajani told Italy’s Sky News channel.

Ms Meloni is staunchly anti-abortion, revealing in a recent autobiography that her mother had come close to aborting her before deciding to keep her child.

Italy’s ruling coalition sparked outrage in some quarters in April after it passed legislation allowing groups who “support motherhood” into abortion advice clinics to try to deter women from terminating pregnancies.

A senior US official told reporters that Mr Biden did not want the reference to abortion to disappear from the text.

“The President felt very strongly that we needed to have at the very least the language that references what we did in Hiroshima on women’s health and reproductive rights. The communique will reiterate the commitment made in Hiroshima,” the official said.

Abortion is a hugely sensitive issue in the US, with Mr Biden promising to create a national right to abortion if he wins re-election in November, warning that his Republican opponent Donald Trump could sign a national ban on the practice.

In the years prior to the Hiroshima summit, the G-7 communiques referred to the importance of safeguarding sexual and reproductive health and rights (SRHR) for women.

Within the framework of SRHR, the right to access to safe abortion services is often included as a fundamental component, and it was not clear if the final communique in Italy would revert to that language to resolve the diplomatic friction. REUTERS