Quoting Victoria de Grazia’s How Fascism Ruled Women, pgs. 55–8:
The liberal state had already dallied with bans on information on birth control and laws punishing abortion. But fascism tightened them by making abortion and the dissemination of birth‐control information crimes of state. The royal decree‐law of November 6, 1926, number 1848, passed in the context of the notorious public safety laws, prohibited the display, sale, possession, distribution, manufacture, and importation of literature, engravings, lithographs, drawings, objects, and so on that offended public decency. This proscription was extended to apply to anything publicizing the means of preventing or interrupting pregnancy. These rules were confirmed in the new penal code approved on October 19, 1930, and put into effect on July 1, 1931, which contained an entire chapter (numbers 545–55) devoted to “crimes against the integrity and health of the race.” Subsequent legislation also stipulated penalties against any person who publicly incited others to use means to prevent procreation or procure abortion, even indirectly or with scientific or therapeutic pretexts.
Certainly, fascist Italy was not alone in obstructing contraceptive measures or banning abortion; liberal and authoritarian regimes alike had barred them by the mid‐1930s. However, the dictatorship’s policies stood out in several respects. First, the suppression of information on contraception was supported by the Laws on Public Safety; “impeding the fecundity of the Italian people” was a crime of state, and at times it was zealously prosecuted by the central government. Even fascist jurists underscored that the crime of inciting to use birth‐control techniques had no precedents elsewhere. Second, the timing of government intervention made fascism’s anti‐Malthusian campaigns especially coercive. In Italy knowledge about birth control, suppressed since the Counter‐reformation, had begun to be retrieved only two generations before, and then very unevenly. In rural areas, even in rural northwestern Italy, a secular ignorance still prevailed. By the late 1920s, the few groups promoting neo‐Malthusianism had been suppressed. Moreover, migratory flows to more sexually emancipated societies, in particular to the United States and France (whence, for example, the Villamauran artisans claimed to have acquired their techniques) were curbed.
[…]
Indeed, the main effect of the repression of information was to increase the acceptance of abortion. When abstinence or coitus interruptus failed, and douches and other postcoital home remedies proved futile, women resorted to abortifacients: emetics, irrigation with herbal infusions and chemical irritants, hair pins, knitting needles, scraping, and probes. They might range in cost from 400 lire for a douche or 600 lire for a probe from a so‐called angelmaker to as much as 1,000 to 2,000 lire for a medical intervention—a huge sum considering that an average monthly wage for a male industrial worker was only 300 lire. Women, however, almost always paid for their abortions, either from their own wages or by scrimping on the household budget, pawning objects, or drawing on savings from small domestic industries. And whether carried out by the hack or the medical professional, all abortions were “backstreet.” They thus carried extra risks of disabling infection, permanent health damage, and death.
To check what officials surmised to be a major cause of fertility decline, the dictatorship sought to rally doctors, midwives, and soc[i]al welfare staff to prosecute abortion. The penal code of 1931 prescribed heavy penalties for illegal abortion, including jail terms of from two to five years for anyone procuring or abetting it and from one to four years for any woman performing an abortion by herself. During the 1930s, the regime considered more draconian measures, such as to require that all pregnancies be registered, though it was obvious that precisely those pregnancies most likely to be aborted would escape official notice. Administrative decrees issued in 1935 by the National Public Health Office (Direzione generale della sanità pubblica) ordered doctors to report cases of procured abortion; a few brave physicians denounced these rulings as clear violations of article 365 of the Criminal Codes, which honored the Hippocratic oath. The many institutions managed by Church personnel may have complied.
(Emphasis added. There’s more, of course, but I chose to omit it for the sake of brevity.)
A 1927 article titled ‘Italian racial protection’ that appeared in the Völkischer Beobachter, the central ideological mouthpiece of [Germany’s Fascist] movement, […] claimed that in sharp contrast to the Weimar Republic, the ‘new’ Italy had introduced a comprehensive network of fascist laws for the ‘protection of the race’, which were of the ‘most burning interest’ to [Germany’s Fascist] movement. The article did not only refer to ‘positive’ eugenic measures, such as support for mothers and children, which supposedly furthered the purity, health and cleanliness of fascist society. It also discussed repressive measures in glowing terms. The article addressed, among other things, [Fascist] policy on abortion, which included retaliatory steps against women and doctors and imposed long prison sentences. The article asserted that such measures served to fortify the strength of the Volk, and argued that a similarly comprehensive policy for national rebirth should finally become a reality in Germany as well.