This chapter explores the WHO 2022 Abortion Care Guideline and some of the debates it engendered through the lens of narrative medicine, as reconceptualised and extended in this book. Rather than treating the guideline as a neutral technical document, the chapter approaches it as a value-laden story narrated by a powerful institution (WHO) about the highly contested topic of abortion care. It examines how the WHO narrative constructs authority, assigns roles (narrators, protagonists, antagonists), selectively highlights certain types of evidence and values, and is informed by specific assumptions about evidence, morality, and care. It further contextualises this story within the broader set of narratives advanced by the guideline’s supporters as well as its opponents in order to develop a nuanced understanding of how global health policies come to be imbued with moral authority or, alternatively, contested as ‘ideological stories’, with far-reaching consequences for global reproductive health governance. Analysing the WHO abortion guideline and its reception through a narrative lens uncovers a struggle between competing storylines – each with its own narrator claiming authority, its own cast of protagonists and antagonists, its curated evidence and value set, and its sense of past and future. These narratives construct very different social realities around abortion care, which in turn shape policy discourse and outcomes.

Although northern Apulia was never directly colonized or occupied during the Iron Age, it has long been recognized that it was subject to significant Greek cultural and economic influence. Local communities seem to have developed a distinct sense of locality, based more on continuity and regional traditions. The area thus offers a valuable comparison to the other case studies in this volume, clearly showing the selectivity of cultural adaptation. This is demonstrated by an examination of the rich funerary record, which provides numerous and diverse examples of the adoption and rejection of foreign (Greek) elements.