Legal abortions per year in Spain top 80,000

Madrid, Spain, Feb 10, 2005 / 22:00 pm

A report from the Superior Council of Scientific Research has revealed the chilling statistics regarding the failure of legal abortion in Spain.  Although the only supposedly legal abortions are for reasons of rape, fetal deformity or “physical or psychiatric risk” to the mother, every day more than 200 women end the life of their unborn children in government-run clinics.

According to Council statistics cited by the Spanish daily La Razon, in 2003 10% of teenagers who obtained abortion had already had one, and one in four adult women obtained an abortion for the second or third time.

The paper explained that “although abortion is one of the most traumatic experiences that a woman can endure,” “repeat abortions have doubled since the beginning of the 1990s.”  

The study outlines the profile of the woman who obtains an abortion in Spain and how it has changed in the last decade.  More than 97% of legal abortions were obtained supposedly for the physical or psychological health of the mother, 2.5% were because of fetal deformity and only .1% were because of rape.

Last year almost 80,000 abortions were performed, up more than twice from official statistics from 1990.  Women are having their first child at a later age—now between 27 and 29—with exactly the opposite occurring with regards to abortion.  The average age for a first abortion is now 27, when before it was 28 and a half.

One of the study’s conclusions is that “the principal determining factor for abortions in Spain is one’s employment, which in the vast majority of cases is dependent upon someone else.” 

La Razon reports that the number of abortions among cohabitating couples has exploded.  In 1991, 4,470 abortions—10.7% of the total number—were obtained by women who were co-habitating.  According to the latest figures, abortions in this group have risen to more than 12,500, almost three times as much.