This paper discusses the current debate on abortion, women’s rights and ”foetal rights”, based on a postdoctoral research carried out in 2011 in Italy and on the preliminary results of a research currently undergoing in Catalunya, Spain. The first part of the paper examines the political, scientific and religious debate on abortion in these countries, where an important political shift in reproductive governance occurred over the last decade, from the partial recognition of women as moral and political subjects to the recognition of the embryo/foetus as a juridical subject to be protected at the cost of women’s health and rights. While neo-liberal policies have recently been implemented and the right to health and women’s sexual and reproductive rights are under attack, the embryo/foetus has progressively acquired personhood and rights in political debates. The increase in conscientious objection to abortion care in Italy in 2000s and the current discussion on a new restrictive abortion law in Spain may be considered as the consequences of this shift. However, how has this shift actually occurred? What is the role of religion and of medical knowledge and practice? The second part of the paper answers this question by discussing the main results of a research carried out in public maternity hospitals in Italy and Spain on health professionals’ and specifically obstetricians-gynaecologists’ experiences and perspectives on abortion. It shows that the development of new prenatal screening techniques has made abortion for medical reasons more acceptable within the medical profession, while contributing to increase abortion stigma in the case of “social” abortion, by transforming the embryo/foetus into the “main” patient and making women subjects disappear from the screen. This is why, despite being legal, abortion for social reasons is still highly stigmatized and is less morally accepted by physicians than abortion for foetal malformations.

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