Induced abortion in Italy: an analysis focused on foreign women

Marzia Loghi, Istituto Nazionale di Statistica (ISTAT)
Alessia D'Errico, Istituto Nazionale di Statistica (ISTAT)
Alessandra Burgio, Istituto Nazionale di Statistica (ISTAT)
Rossana Cotroneo, Istituto Nazionale di Statistica (ISTAT)
Roberta Crialesi, Istituto Nazionale di Statistica (ISTAT)

Subsequent to the legalization of abortion in 1978, the Italian Institute of Statistics (ISTAT) started the survey on induced abortion (IA) in 1979. The Italian trend shows that from 1980 to nowadays (2009) there has been a considerable decreasing trend for IA rates (from 15.3 per 1000 cases per women aged 15-49 to 8.0 per 1000). The aims of this paper are to study the recourse to IA especially by foreign women resident in Italy compared to Italian ones, and to compare levels of IA of migrant women resident in Italy with those living in their own country. Focusing on women with not Italian citizenship, it is clear that their proportion of IAs has been increasing over time. In 1995, it was 6,6% while in 2009 it became 33,8%. In particular, it emerges that Romanians living in Italy have higher total fertility rate (TFR) and higher total abortion rate (TAR) than their peers in Romania, and the relationship between fertility levels and abortion levels seems similar in both groups. According to these results the high recourse to IA of Romanian women resident in Italy seems to be more affected by their cultural background than by their migrant condition. Based on the results coming from the preliminary analyses by nationality, age and marital status, it was applied a simulation model (decision tree) to estimate the association among various factors with the risk of IA among migrant women, comparing them with Italian ones. Results show that young women, never married women and foreign women (Romanians in particular), are the subgroups with a higher probability to have recourse to IA. In conclusion, Romanians living in Italy have higher IA levels (31.8 per 1000) than Italian women (6.4 per 1000) and than Romanian ones living in their own country (23.5 per 1000).