Disturbing and threatening women who go to hospitals and clinics to have abortions becomes a crime. The Spanish Senate approved a modification of the penal code: the new legislation, promoted by the Socialist Party of Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez, will enter into force as soon as it is published in the Official State Gazette.
Since then, all those who “hinder the exercise of the right to voluntary termination of pregnancy“Annoy a woman” with harassing, offensive, intimidating or coercive acts that damage her freedom “will be punished with imprisonment from three months to one year or with community work. The same penalties are also foreseen for those who try to intimidate the health professionals who care for these women.
In Spain, abortion was decriminalized in 1985, but only in cases of rape, serious health risks for the mother and fetal malformation. It is only since 2010 that termination of pregnancy without medical justification has been legalized up to the fourteenth week of gestation.
Yet Spanish women planning to have abortions continue to face multiple obstacles: not only the shortage of doctors willing to perform the procedure, but also the harassment of anti-abortion activists, who often gather in front of the centers where the abortion is performed. abortion to persuade women not to enter. They try to dissuade them with prayers, posters or slogans, asking direct questions, showing small fetuses in plastic or asking pregnant women to follow them in their vans equipped with the equipment to perform ultrasound scans.
A report of the Asociación de Clínicas Acreditadas para la Interrupción del embarazo (Acai) of 2018 states that ben 89% of women who had abortions in Spain felt harassed and 66% threatened.
The progressive government of Sánchez is preparing a law to ensure that all public hospitals perform abortions: according to the Spanish doctors association WTO, “most” of gynecologists and midwives working in the public sector they consider themselves “conscientious objectors”. The government is also calling for a change in legislation, so that girls under the age of 16 and 17 can terminate a pregnancy without parental consent, as in the UK and France.
Other stories of Vanity Fair that might interest you:
The real interest of anti-abortionists? Check women
Maíra, 15 years in prison for abortion. All countries where it is not yet legal
Abortion, the reasons for the “historic” decline in Italy
Source: Vanity Fair
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