PP seeks minor changes to abortion law following reform fiasco

Following the fiasco of its once-ambitious abortion reform plans, the center-right Popular Party (PP) government is seeking to make some minor and discreet changes to existing legislation.

The PP has drafted a brief bill containing just two articles and three provisions, which will only affect the issue of parental consent in the cases of 16- to 18-year-olds seeking to terminate their pregnancies.

The move, which is unpopular among the party’s most conservative wing, effectively drops the original plans to completely overhaul the current law. Abortion reform was one of the PP’s star projects when it won the general elections in November 2011.

But opposition to the idea of eliminating abortion on demand in the first trimester and taking Spain back to case-based abortions was so strong, even within PP ranks, that it triggered the resignation of the justice minister at the time, Alberto Ruiz-Gallardón.

The minister was even proposing a ban on abortions in cases of accredited fetal deformities, a notion that ran into a wall of rejection.

Now, the government is settling for requiring minors to have permission from their parents before terminating their pregnancies.

The Constitutional Court is still considering an appeal lodged some time ago by the PP against the current abortion law, which was passed in 2010 by the Socialist administration of José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero.