A minor correction

One of the most sensible decisions the government could make is to scrap its abortion reform bill. But it has no intention of doing so; in fact, everything suggests that the project is being reactivated in order to turn it into law before the 2015 election campaigns.

True, the Justice Ministry appears to have dropped the earlier rhetoric of Minister Alberto Ruiz-Gallardón, and now accepts some changes to the way women carrying a fetus with an abnormality will get treated: these women will no longer be forced to prove that giving birth would cause them psychological damage.

But this correction will not be satisfactory to those who have always fought against abortion rights. Nor will it convince people with no moral objections to abortion, or the pragmatic sectors of society who are happy with the current legislation.

To staunchly carry on with the reform entails a risk of taking Spain back to the past

It is easy to understand why the Popular Party (PP) is uneasy about the political price it could pay for the government’s stubborn decision to modify the existing law, which was passed in 2010 under the Socialist administration of Prime Minister José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero and allows abortion on demand in the first trimester.

To deny women the right to terminate their pregnancies within a given time frame is to refute the wishes of the majority of Spanish society. Nor is it reasonable to demand that women go through endless amounts of paperwork to obtain an abortion in limited circumstances, including the obligation to secure two different psychiatric reports.

It is no less shocking to burden judges with the decision of whether to allow a 16- or 17-year-old to have an abortion or not, if her parents disagree with her. Even the Attorney Council has advised against this scenario.

The careful way in which PP secretary general María Dolores de Cospedal talks about the reform only confirms the internal rift over this issue. The deputy speaker in Congress, Celia Villalobos, who has broken ranks with her party over abortion on several occasions, has expressed hope that this project “will never make it to Congress.”

Certainly, a ruling party facing a potential decline in votes has much more pressing problems to deal with than spending energy on rebuilding internal consensus over abortion.

No woman is forced to terminate her pregnancy under the current law, yet many could be forced to give birth if the new bill comes into force. Nor has there been any significant growth in the number of abortions that could justify the government’s alarm; on the contrary, the abortion statistics are evolving in a rather stable manner.

To staunchly carry on with the reform entails the risk of taking Spain back to the past, when poor women had clandestine abortions in unhygienic conditions, while wealthier ones traveled abroad to terminate their unwanted pregnancies.

None of this makes sense in a non-denominational state that also happens to be a modern, evolved European society.