Rift grows in Spanish Catholic Church over “right to life” debate

Twenty-eight years after Spain decriminalized abortion, the issue continues to divide society. The Roman Catholic Church has long campaigned against a woman’s right to choose, and is pressuring the Popular Party (PP) government of Mariano Rajoy to abide by its promise of rolling back legislation introduced by the former Socialist Party administration of José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero in 2010, giving women the right to abortion on demand for up to 14 weeks of pregnancy.

Until 2010, abortion was only legal on three conditions: to preserve the physical and mental health of the mother; if the pregnancy was a result of rape or incest; or if the fetus was likely to suffer mental or physical abnormalities at birth. There were also time limits and the need for doctors’ agreement, and young women under the age of 18 required parental permission.

The current law, which aimed to bring Spain more in line with its northern European neighbors, gives women the right to abort up to the 22nd week of pregnancy in cases where the mother’s health is at risk or the fetus shows serious deformities.

The Catholic Church bitterly opposed the 1985 legislation and 25 years later, with the tacit support of the PP, rallied thousands of protestors onto the streets of Madrid to show their opposition to extending and guaranteeing abortion rights in the run-up to the passing of the 2010 law. Last week the General Synod of Bishops launched a new campaign aimed at pressuring the government to push ahead with repealing the 2010 law and restricting access to abortion yet further — bearing in mind that less than five percent of terminations take place in state hospitals.

The justice minister promised changes to the law “in the first quarter of 2013”

Last year, when he announced his intentions, Justice Minister Alberto Ruiz-Gallardón promised to put his changes to the law before Congress “in the first quarter of 2013.” With the deadline now expired, he has been targeted by self-styled pro-life groups who have staged street protests chiding the government for failing to move quickly to repeal the current abortion law.

But Gallardón has yet to announce exactly what changes he intends to make and his party seems unwilling to push the matter. At the same time, the bishops know that significant numbers of Catholics do not support restricting abortion rights further.

The title of the Synod of Bishops’ 2013 Campaign for Life is “This is me… human from the beginning,” and will take the form of a 150,000-euro campaign that will produce hundreds of billboards nationwide, along with pamphlets and letters to parishioners. The Church also intends to use social media — for example recommending the faithful change their Facebook photo for one of an ultrasound image of a fetus.

But the Roman Catholic Church is not limiting its activities to reminding its flock of their obligation to protect life at all cost; the campaign is also directed at the government. “A well-developed Christian conscience cannot favor with its vote the carrying out of a political program, or the approval of a law, that contains proposals that go against the fundamental contents of faith and morality. Our obligation is to help obtain a clearer picture of justice and of the morality of our laws. The current legislation is gravely unjust. It needs to be urgently modified to help recognize and protect the rights of all in relation to the most elemental and primary right to life.”

José Ignacio Munilla talks about abortion in terms of a “silent holocaust”

Leading the campaign to pressure the government are some of the country’s best-known senior clergy, among them the head of the General Synod of Bishops, Cardinal Antonio María Rouco; the bishop of San Sebastián, José Ignacio Munilla, who talks about abortion in terms of a “silent holocaust”; the archbishop of Oviedo, Jesús Sanz — “I am enormously surprised that this conservative government has still not changed the abortion law” — along with Juan Antonio Reig Plan, the bishop of Alcalá de Henares and president of the Synod’s family and life sub-commission: “The battle against abortion and in favor of life will be long; surely as long as that which sought to end slavery,” he said last week. Comparing the fight against abortion with the struggle against slavery is a gambit borrowed from the US anti-abortion rights movement.

There are also groups within the Catholic Church that take a much more radical position on abortion, demanding a total ban. “If it is a crime then it cannot be accepted under any circumstances,” they argue, accusing the Popular Party of “conserving the advances of the Socialists.”

But within the Catholic Church there are significant numbers of clergy and parishioners who see the daily reality of women struggling to deal with an unwanted pregnancy. The question that Church leaders now have to ask themselves is whether they want to expose these women to the risk of jail terms if abortion is once again made illegal.

These are Catholics who feel that while they belong to the Church of Rome, they are also increasingly distanced by many of its policies, and not just in relation to abortion. As theologian Juan José Tamayo, director of the Theology and Religious Sciences Chair at the Carlos III University in Madrid points out: “These are believers who have interiorized the message that the founder of the Christian Church preached to the religious hierarchy of his time: that the most important thing is to alleviate, and if possible to eradicate, suffering, above and beyond compliance with temporal laws.”

If it is a crime then it cannot be accepted under any circumstances”

The Christian Network, which represents hundreds of grassroots Catholic associations and groups throughout Spain, accuses Justice Minister Alberto Ruiz-Gallardón of playing politics with the abortion rights issue. “Everything was pretty much calm, and then along comes Gallardón and with him, for ideological reasons, the minority voice of Catholic nationalism demands to be heard, trying to shout down the peaceful passage of a law on sexual health and voluntary termination of pregnancy. Reflecting human rights and the latest advances in anthropological-biology, this law puts us in line ethically and legally with the modern nations of our socio-cultural milieu. Creating a social problem, with 83 percent of voters against the proposed reforms, is both dangerous and stupid,” it says.

The Platform for the Defense of Reproductive and Sexual Rights adds: “The government must guarantee that something that for some people is a sin should not become a crime for the rest of us; defending our democracy against religious fundamentalists in the process. Restrictive legislation will never succeed in avoiding abortion; it simply increases deaths among women. The new law will mean that women with money will have abortions clandestinely, while the less fortunate will likely turn to dangerous homemade remedies.”

Margarita Pintos, the president of the Association for Interreligious Dialogue, says that the issue of abortion rights needs to be addressed “from the perspective of human rights, as a public health matter. Sexual and reproductive health is part of our overall welfare and goes beyond the simple right of having access to contraception or family planning services. Sexual rights ensure that we all have the possibility to make decisions about our sexuality and to exercise them freely, without pressure or violence. Imposing limits on abortion rights is related to religious beliefs, and not just cultural or socio-economic factors.”

Pintos says that while all religions are based on a principle of respect for human life and dignity, “only in the Catholic Church is abortion considered a crime; a doctrine that is entirely open to interpretation. At the end of the day, a religious patriarchy cannot accept that women have the right to decide for themselves, without coercion, what they can and cannot do with or to their bodies. If women do not accept the role that the patriarchy has assigned them, they will be committing an act of rebellion against divine will. The majority of women are not afraid of these kinds of threats. We are aware that our bodies have been colonized and we are angry about it.”

Restrictive legislation will not end abortion; it will just increase deaths”

Juan Masía Clavel, a Jesuit theologian and a widely respected expert on bio-ethics, says that the abortion debate makes him uncomfortable. “The old manuals on urbanity used to say that a good dessert can cleanse the effects of a heavy second course. I am currently suffering from the suffocating effects of some ecclesiastics. I have recently reread some paragraphs from the biography of John the Good. It was in the July of 1962, when a suffocating heat was making the cardinals sweat during the formation of the commissions that would make up the Vatican Council. The biographer of the popes, Peter Hebblethwaite, tells us about John XXIII, the Pope who oversaw the Vatican Council: ‘Pope John began to distance himself from some of the initial drafts, or Vatican II. One day he measured a page with his ruler and said: fifteen centimeters of punishments and just two centimeters of praise. Is that the way to dialog with the contemporary world?’ It was down to Cardinal Montini, later Paul VI, to get the rest of the council to understand this idea. The anathema and the punishments, he said, are not the response to contemporary mistakes. In the modern world, the remedies for mistakes are forgiveness, charity, and the testimony of the Christian life.”

Those who support Clavel’s ideas and believe, for humanitarian reasons, in decriminalizing abortion are outraged when they hear senior figures within the Church such as Antonio Cañizares, the former head of the Catholic Church in Spain, and now the prefect of the Congregation for Divine Worship and Discipline of the Sacraments — the body responsible for liturgical and sacramental matters within the Roman Catholic Church — say that voluntary termination of a pregnancy is worse than child abuse by priests. Or, in the words of Jorge Gómez of the archdiocese of Buenos Aires: “The violation of faith is a thousand times worse than raping a young girl.”