Millions of anti-abortion campaigners protesting against a bill to change Spanish abortion laws marched through Madrid on Saturday, 17 October 2009, in one of the largest demonstrations since anti-war protests in 2003 and 2004. Civic and religious groups say they chartered some 600 buses and several planes to bring people in from other cities.
Every Life Counts was the slogan under which the Spanish anti-abortion groups organised the march, which was invented to resist Socialist Prime Minister Jose Luis Rodriguez Zapatero’s plans to introduce abortion on demand. The protest was called to denounce a bill sponsored by the Government that would allow unrestricted abortion up to 14 weeks of pregnancy and let girls aged 16 and 17 have abortions without parental knowledge and consent.
The Spanish Parliament is expected to vote this year on the legislation. The Socialist government says the law would give women full rights over their reproductive choices and include the ‘voluntary interruption of pregnancy’ as part of a broader national strategy on sexual and reproductive health, with education and access to contraceptives, aimed at preventing unwanted pregnancies. They add that the law would bring Spain into line with other European countries, such as Britain, France and Germany, which also unrestricted abortion in the early stages of pregnancy.
The protesters, who included former Prime Minister Jose Maria Aznar, carried red and white banners or flags saying ‘For Life, Women and Motherhood’, ‘Women Against Abortion’ and ‘Madrid 2009, Capital of Life.’
(Click here to watch the video of the protest)
Belen Lopez, one of the protesters who is a 41-year-old lawyer, said human life begins at conception, and Spain was erring in following other countries’ examples and instead should not allow abortion at all.
‘The other countries that do that are also wrong about what the conception of life is,’ she said.
‘This new law is a barbarity,’ said Jose Carlos Felicidad, 67, another protester who travelled from the southern town of Algeciras to take part in the protest. ‘In this country, they protect animals more than human beings,’ he added.
Andrea Caballeria, a 15-year-old girl, said she opposed the clause allowing minors to abort without parental consent.
‘I don't think it is right for a 16-year-old girl to take the decision to kill a child, who is a person who can be like me or you in a few years,’ she said.
‘We have clearly beaten attendance at our previous marches; over 900 coaches with demonstrators have come to take part,’ said Mercedes Coloma, an organizer and the chairwoman of COFAPA, a parents’ association.
Benigno Blanco, the chairman of the Family Forum, said that the ant-abortion campaign does not recognise national and religious differences. He said:
‘We invite all 48 million Spaniards, regardless of the political party they belong to, whether they wear a cassock or practice their religion in a synagogue or a mosque.’
Prime Minister Zapatero has recently passed a series of sweeping liberal social reforms since coming to power in 2004 that have angered civic and religious groups, including measures to legalise homosexual ‘marriage’, allow for fast-track divorces and give increased rights to transsexuals.
Before the demonstration took place, Braulio Rodriguez, Archbishop of Toledo who studied the new bill, said that the new law ‘has little to do with sexual health’ and treats abortion ‘as if it were a right’. He blamed the legislation for using the term ‘reproduction’ and added that ‘abortion is repulsive to reason’.
‘Lawmakers in Europe often fall into a sort of contradiction,’ he continued, since ‘on the one hand they want to broaden the individual rights of the person but on the other they work less for other rights such as the right to be born, the right to life and to right to not go hungry and to employment.’
An opinion poll published in Friday’s ABC newspaper said 42 percent of Spaniards believed there was no overwhelming popular support for the abortion reforms, compared to 38 percent who believed there was.
In the US, the debate over health-care reform has entered a new phase with aggressive negotiations as to how to handle abortion funding. It is reported that a Rasmussen poll released last month showed that only 13 per cent of Americans want the health-care reform bill to use tax dollars to fund abortions. A Pew Research Center poll two weeks ago showed that support for legalised abortion has dropped to its lowest level in years to 47 per cent, down from 54 per cent last year.
(See the Fox News report)
On 10 October 2009, The New York Times, the largest metropolitan newspaper in the US, had published an article on pro-life activism and abortion issues, and featured photos of aborted babies.
Last week, a report of the Guttmacher Institute, a not-for-profit sexual health organisation based in the US, said that more than 41 million women had abortions globally in just one year. A total of 40 per cent of the world’s women live in countries with ‘highly restrictive’ abortion laws – virtually all of them in the developing world, the study said. In Africa, 92 per cent of reproductive-age women live under such abortion laws and in Latin America, 97 per cent do so. A total of 32 countries have laws that make abortion illegal.
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