Former Spanish president slams 'right to abortion'

Madrid, Spain, Jun 4, 2009 / 17:11 pm

The former president of Spain, Jose Maria Aznar, has criticized the government’s proposal to overhaul the laws on abortion saying, “Abortion is not and can never be a right” because “what is a right is the right to life.” He also slammed the government for “pretending to make the ending of human life into a right.”

During a speech at the University of San Pablo in Madrid, Aznar warned that Spaniards should be suspicious of a government that “manifests grave difficulties in distinguishing between what is human and what isn’t,” especially in a scientific sense, which he said was “especially alarming.”

“To proceed down a path that leads to the destruction of the right to life and to pervert it into a false right to end life is, simply, to go backwards on the path of civilization,” the former president said.

It is not the State’s job, said Aznar, to come up with “new and degrading definitions of what a human being is,” or to “torpedo the educational role parents have with their children.”

He also warned that society should be concerned when the government uses its power to “obscure the ethical judgment of its citizens, especially of minors,” or when the government “assumes the right to decide a matter that should only be the responsibility of the individual.”

Aznar went on to specifically criticize a provision in the proposed reform that would allow girls aged 16 to 18 to obtain abortions without parental consent. “I am one of those who think that a good father or mother is one who stands by his or her daughter to help and support her precisely during the most difficult moments,” he emphasized.

In a reference to statements by the current president, Jose Luis Rodriguez Zapatero, Aznar said a government must be called into question when it scorns and attacks the family by saying that parents who worry about their pregnant 16 year-old daughter are interfering. Such statements lack even a “minimum sense of ethics and basic common sense,” he said, and are a warning sign that “something worse” is on the horizon.

Aznar said that when a government adopts the principle that when in doubt is better to err against rather than in favor of human life, and when it considers it has the authority to erode family bonds, the government “has lost its way in a society of free citizens, in a plural society at whose service it ought to be.”