Seldom does a law concerning fewer than 500 people elicit as much controversy as did Spain’s reform of its 2010 Organic Law on Voluntary Pregnancy Interruption, passed by Congress on April 15. The amendment requires that the legal guardians of all underage women seeking an abortion give consent prior to the procedure. This may seem hardly controversial given that it sets abortion on par with other medical procedures performed on Spanish minors. However, the original law contained an important caveat: 16 and 17 year olds only had to inform (not receive consent from) their legal guardians. Additionally, if they thought that doing so would put them at risk of violence or social exclusion, they could opt to inform legal representatives instead.
A study by the Association of Private Abortion Clinics found that in 2014, less than 1 percent of women (12 percent of all 16 and 17 year olds) who had abortions chose not to inform their parents. As Elena Valenciano, leader of the Socialist Party (PSOE) in the European Parliament pointed out, overall only 400 underage women a year forego parental consent, meaning the reform will not have much real impact. The push to institute the reform therefore reflects political motives: the ruling conservative Partido Popular’s (PP) attempts to mobilize its voting base without alienating mainstream voters in the anticipation of December’s general election. More broadly, the reform aims to fight a trend of increasingly progressive sentiment among Spain’s electorate.
Conservatism on the Wane
Although much of Spain’s social modernization can be traced back to former Prime Minister Felipe González’s 1982 socialist government, cultural change has been more recently enacted by his socialist successor, Jose Luis Rodríguez Zapatero. Once a young, charismatic leader, now fallen from grace for his handling of the economic crisis, Zapatero introduced far-reaching social reform. It is his legacy that the PP is so keen to overturn. Under his government Spain became the first country in the world with a majority female cabinet, the third country to legalize same-sex marriage, and one of few countries with a ministry of gender equality, making it a pioneer in enacting laws to redress gender violence. As further evidence of his liberalism, he was a self-proclaimed agnostic, recalled Spanish troops from Iraq mere “hours after his government was sworn in,” and pushed for greater reliance on renewable energy.
Perhaps more remarkable is the relative ease with which Zapatero achieved his vision: he won reelection by a landslide majority in 2008 and only fell into disgrace once the economic crisis was under way. While pro-life rallies organized by Catholic groups still occur on a yearly basis, the status quo in Spain is one of social liberalism. The country is no longer comparable to Catholic Ireland and Poland, where support for bans on abortion is still high and weekly mass attendance rates are more than double what they are in Spain. Spanish Catholicism is on the wane; with polls suggesting that a majority of Spanish Catholics support the right to some form of abortion, pro-choice seems to be the norm.
Bringing the Right Back
Given this trend of liberalism, it is not surprising that the current reform is already a watered-down version of what it could have been. In 2014, the government had to shelve a draft that only allowed abortions until week 12 of pregnancy in the case of rape, and until week 22 in the event of pregnancy-related physical or mental health risks. Championed by then Justice Minister Alberto Ruiz-Gallardón, this earlier proposal divided the PP and was met with widespread popular disapproval, including a march down the streets of Madrid. Curiously, Ruiz-Gallardón was not known as a fervent conservative, having crossed party lines to support gay marriage and going as far as officiating the first gay wedding as Mayor of Madrid. After losing the battle to criminalize most forms of abortion, however, he resigned in an act symbolic of the profound schism between right wing Spanish Catholics and their secular, progressive counterparts.
Despite this defeat, however, altering previous abortion laws remains an integral part of the program of the ruling conservative PP. Prior to the economic crisis, the PP spent an entire term in the opposition rejecting the fast-paced cultural change enacted by Spanish progressives in recent decades. In 2005, it tried to revoke the legalization of gay marriage by appealing to the Constitutional Court. In 2010, it again forwarded a motion to the Constitutional Court that declared progressive abortion laws unconstitutional. This tactic allowed the PP to temporarily satisfy their core voters while ensuring that judges behind closed doors held the sort of debate that would have alienated liberal voters. After gaining power the PP showed no signs of tempering its conservatism, but in maintaining its anti-abortion, anti-gay marriage stance, it arguably overstretched itself. Despite having an absolute majority, efforts to restrict adult women’s abortions via parliamentary procedures failed due to popular discontent, and the Constitutional Court struck down the bids to ban abortion and gay marriage.
Treading the Line
Why then, having so far failed to achieve meaningful social change, is the PP pushing for last minute tinkering of a moderately popular clause of an underage abortion law? A straightforward answer is that breaking electoral promises would be a sign of weakness, and with less than a year until the general elections, the conservatives are being forced to settle for incremental change. Speaking to the HPR, Harvard European Studies Professor José Manuel Martínez Sierra referred to the PP as “treading a line between appeasing its conservative voters and trying not to alienate liberals.” “The PP”, he continued, “is responding to the rise of Ciudadanos (polling at 18.4% compared to the PP’s 18.6%), a center-right party with a clean slate that promises to enact change.” Partido Popular’s great achievement, according to Martínez Sierra, was becoming the party for the whole spectrum of the Spanish right. That changed after the European economic crisis, and liberal former PP voters increasingly see Ciudadanos as the preferred alternative.
Martínez Sierra expects the abortion policy reform to drive away at least some voters from the PP. “Abortion is present in every woman’s life: either because she or a friend or a family member once needed one or thought that she may one day need one. Although they toned down the initial proposal, the overall impression the PP has made will harm their share of liberal and women voters”. Still, in a country where the vote is divided between four parties, Podemos, PSOE, PP and Ciudadanos, the importance of mobilizing a party’s core voting base cannot be underestimated. The PP seems to have made the decision to sacrifice some of their fringe supporters in order to restore the party faithful’s belief in its adherence to conservative ideals.
Yet making underage abortion a hot-button electoral debating point could ultimately distract legislators from the plight of the 400 or so young women that every year, threatened with physical violence or marginalization, petition to forego their parents’ consent. The reform is, moreover, unlikely to satisfy pro-life voters for whom the idea of 400 young women undergoing abortions without their parents’ consent pales in comparison to the 100,000 abortions carried out annually in Spain. The move could carve a deeper division along religious and cultural lines between the Spanish right and the left.
The updated law runs the risk of leaving most parties involved worse off while only offering minimal electoral benefits to the PP. With voters heavily divided, mobilizing conservatives with snippets of legislation could be a viable way for the PP to salvage what could be a historically close election. The reform of the abortion law, however, is likely to backfire in the long run.
Image Source: Wikimedia // David Berkowitz
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