An Italian journalist takes a critical look at the ambient religious and political culture around “natural” methodologies of fertility management.
On its website, the secular sounding Italian Confederation of Centres for the Natural Regulation of Fertility has a startling graphic of an iceberg.
According to the accompanying text, the graphic symbolises the grim reality of Italy’s annual “massacre of the innocents” (an emotive term taken from the Bible, though this isn’t specified). The tip of the iceberg represents the 80,000 or so “voluntary abortions” carried out in Italy each year. The much larger part of the iceberg, hidden below water, represents all those lives the Confederation believes to have been prevented in other ways: through the use of the contraceptive pill, IUDs or even IVF (on the basis that IVF involves the creation and destruction of human embryos, outside the body).
By the Confederation’s gruesome mathematics, if you add all these numbers together, the true number of annual abortions in Italy is nearly 1.5 million. Its solution? To count the days and observe the symptoms of ovulation so as to better predict when a woman is more or less likely to conceive. In place of a woman’s basic right to choose, the Confederation offers a toolkit for self-monitoring. Not exactly hidden on its website, but also very far from advertised, is the religious component to all this: the teachings of the Catholic Church, repackaged as public health.
In an article for Internazionale entitled ‘Un altro modo per controllare il corpo delle donne’ (‘Another way to control women’s bodies’) feminist writer Jennifer Guerra investigates the problematic histories and present of “natural” methods of managing fertility, at a time when women’s bodies are once more political battlefields around the world.
In the United States, the overturning of Roe v. Wade in 2022 has been accompanied by a conservative Supreme Court Justice declaring a desire to look at the availability of the pill next, Elon Musk declaring that it contributes to suicide, and the reduced practical availability of contraception due to the wider chilling effect of the ruling.
Deeper than this, Guerra sees the emergence of an amorphous anti-feminist nexus in the growth of the menstrual cycle app 28 (funded partly by Peter Thiel) and the popular emergence of tradwives on TikTok. (Guerra takes the case of the conservative lifestyle magazine Evie, and its feature of the wildly popular Hannah Neeleman, aka Ballerina Farm, who herself rejects the tradwife label). The app 28 may appear to be a female self-empowering health app, with a somewhat horoscope-y vibe to its website and a strong emphasis on being in tune with your body (“Let’s introduce you to you”, it says). But Guerra quotes data journalist Donata Columbro’s warning that data from the app can serve a different purpose: “you expect to receive wellness advice, and instead this data is used to promote an agenda that limits reproductive health”.
Although natural methods for the management of fertility have their origins in observations made by Japanese doctor Kyusaku Ogino and the Austrian physician Hermann Knaus in the 1920s, it was Pope Paul VI’s 1968 encyclical Humanae Vitae, which gave the Catholic church’s imprimatur to these methods (largely in response to the pill). Guerra notes that the Italian Confederation of Centres for the Natural Regulation of Fertility – with 770 volunteers in 22 centres across Italy – is a continuation of the logic of Humanae Vitae, mixing science and a strongly Catholic-inflected precepts of what human relationships should look like, and the behaviours within them.
People who don’t fully subscribe to all aspects of this cultural outlook can find themselves excluded from the supposedly scientific and educational aspects of the Confederation’s work (some of which receives indirect public financial support). Guerra cites the case of Laura, a menstrual educator. The fact that she was an unmarried woman in her forties raised suspicions, Laura says. Then she went a step further, questioning some of the teachings, such as the injunction against masturbation beyond adolescence. “I was turned away”, Laura tells Internazionale.
If it isn’t always obvious who is behind the Confederation, Anna Buzzoni, an educator for menstrual health suggests people should be able to read between the lines: “if the course is free or the cost is minimal, you have to ask yourself: who’s paying for this?” She recommends explicitly asking whether provision is secular or religious.
In Italy, this feels part of a wider campaign. Guerra notes attempts to change the legislation around advice given to women to help prioritise “natural” methodologies, and the TeenStar project, linked to a doctor opposed to hormonal contraception.
One way and another, the female body remains inescapably a subject of religious and political agendas, hidden or not.
CEM
This article by Jennifer Guerra first appeared in Internazionale in Italian under the title ‘Un altro modo per controllare il corpo delle donne’ on 10 January 2025.
It is available here.
Jennifer Guerra is a feminist writer and journalist in Italy.
Internazionale is a weekly Italian news magazine founded in 1993 which, amongst other things, translates articles from around the world into Italian.
