Forty-three years after neighboring Italy, the tiny enclave of San Marino voted Sunday, September 26 in favor of legalizing abortion. According to provisional results published by the Ministry of the Interior, 77% of voters in this micro-state with a strong Catholic tradition approved the option of giving women the free choice of having abortion for up to twelve. weeks of pregnancy and after this period in case of threat to the life of the mother or deformities detected in the fetus, indicate these results which relate to 33 of the 37 polling divisions.
This referendum, carried out among the 35,411 voters in the enclave, was at the initiative of the Union of San Marino Women (UDS), a feminist association from the 1970s to 1980s resuscitated in 2019. Until then, the abortion was a felony, punishable by imprisonment of up to three years for the woman and six years for the doctor who performed it. But in fact, there have never been any convictions because the San Marino women go to Italy to have an abortion, thus circumventing the law.
San Marino was one of the last states in Europe – along with Malta, Andorra and the Vatican – to ban abortion entirely, even in cases of rape, incest, fetal disease or danger to the mother. Another anti-abortion stronghold, Gibraltar, relaxed its laws after a referendum in June.