Pro-life groups rally against Spain's abortion law

Madrid, Spain, Jun 5, 2012 / 16:07 pm

Pro-life groups in Spain are urging reform the country’s law on abortion, as 120 associations, clinics and health care professionals issued a manifesto opposing any reform efforts.

Benigno Blanco, president of the local Forum on the Family, told Europa Press these organizations are part of the “the old abortion rights lobby and radical feminism.”

“They don’t want to admit that times are changing and that what Spanish society is demanding is greater justice and support for pregnant women and the unborn,” Blanco said.

He said proposed reforms of the law would be “positive” as long as they are focused on granting greater protection to women and their unborn babies. 

Blanco noted that more than 95 percent of abortions in Spain are performed because of the “psychological health” of the mother. Such a loop hole needs to be “profoundly curtailed,” he added, so that the exception will only apply to “very grave health problems irresolvable by other means and is equal to the constitutional value of the life of the unborn.”

For his part, the president of the Institute for Family Policy, Eduardo Hertfelder, called the manifesto “truly backwards” as he believes everyone should fight “for the life and the freedom of women and the unborn.”

“I find it to be out-of-date and sectarian that in the 21st century certain institutions exist that want to return to a situation that has been proven to be an absolute failure, both for the unborn child and for the mother,” Hertfelder said.

“Women are being used for ideological purposes that have nothing to do with the defense of life,” he added.

It is “an absolute aberration” to say that abortion is a right “for women or for anybody,” Hertfelder said, and therefore overturning the 2010 abortion law is only a first step towards eliminating other exceptions for abortion such as for reasons of psychological health.

Even if the law were overturned, he noted, that would mean more than 110,000 abortions would still be performed in Spain each year, but eliminating the exception for reasons of psychological health would save up to 1,500 lives annually.