The Diplomat in Spain

The sociologist, Pedro Arriola./ Photo: Nueva Economía Forum.

Cristina de la Hoz. Madrid.

The proposal to reform the Time-limit abortion Law caused, from its inception, a strong internal movement in opposition, bolstered by some polls that showed, according to Pedro Arriola, sociologist and an assessor to Mariano Rajoy in electoral matters, how unpopular it was. At the beginning of September it was cast aside.

Pedro Arriola, sociologist married to Celia Villalobos, who is Congress’ first vice-president and supporter of the Time-limit abortion law, has spent the months testing the degree of acceptance of a reform that has done nothing but cause Rajoy headaches. A mere fifteen days after the project passed to the Council of Ministers, on 20 December last year, Arriola transmitted to the “hard core” of the PP that the technical draw between PP and PSOE that the polls were showing back then, could be broken, in favour of the socialists, if the reform was carried out. The forecast, made in the campaign prior to the European elections, put the Moncloa on alert.

At the time there had already been public statements from leading regional barons, rejecting Alberto Ruiz-Gallardón’s call for a new, more restrictive law than the 1985 one, due to the fact that it would not include a eugenic element; which allowed a foetus to be aborted in the case of it developing issues. The Galician, Alberto Núñez Feijóo, José Antonio Monago, from Extremadura, and even the ever-prudent Juan Vicente Herrera, from Castilla y León, expressed their opposition. Herrera wondered if it wouldn’t be wiser to wait for the Constitutional Court’s declarations, given that the PP itself had challenged the Time-limit Law in 2010.

The polemic uncovered the lack of support for Gallardón. The head of the Ministry of the Interior, Jorge Fernández Díaz, a man of deep religious conviction, defended the reform, as did Ana Mato, as well as there emerging some support among pervious congressional seats, such as Eugenio Nasarre or Luis Peral. Jaime Mayor Oreja, now also outside of politics, supported the change, but few others.

After the harsh results of the European elections, the territorial leadership passed on to Génova their demand that local and autonomic elections not be mixed in with the abortion debate. As the year wore on, and Gallardón kept issuing dates for the conversion from pre-project to bill, Ariona honed his studies. He revealed the last one the first weekend in September: more than 75 of the PP electorate rejected the reform. Panic set in. A rectification of this magnitude required a scape goat and it was to be Alberto Ruiz-Gallardón.

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Gallardón maintained that his reform was based on the appeal before the Constitutional Court, signed by Rajoy

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Gallardón explained in his farewell before the press that he “did everything in accordance with the party’s doctrine as it appeared within the appeal submitted to the Constitutional Court. What were the arguments brandished in the 133 page text, signed by 70 PP deputies, among them Mariano Rajoy, Soraya Sáenz de Santamaría, Alfonso Alonso, Jorge Fernández Díaz, Ana Mato, Fátima Báñez and Miguel Arias Cañete?

The so called Time-limit Law, of Aído Law, for the surname of the minister that wrote it, was rejected by the PP because they considered that the State “gave up on the protection of the life of the nasciturus, and abandoned its fate to what the mother decides”, leaving it “completely helpless, allowing it to be sacrificed without any objective reason”, “attacks human life” and was even compared to the practices of the Nazi regime when they stated that “we are entering a road that justifies all the totalitarian acts of villainy that have ever been perpetrated against the dignity of human beings”.

When it comes to the eugenic issue, the PP rejected the widening of time-limits on abortion in the case of “serious physical or psychological defects” of the foetus, arguing that “we remember ill-fated eugenic theories defended in the argumentation of ‘lives that don’t deserve life’ (lebensunwertes leben) or ‘lives that are a burden’ (ballastexistenzen)”.

The PP maintained, 25 years after the case regulation of 1985, that there was no longer a place for eugenics once the measures like the Dependence Law, or others relating to access to employment, education, housing or mobility for the disabled were introduced. Therefore, a time had come in which discrimination “can’t be admitted in a State in which every human being, however big their disability or grave their illness is, has the right to not be discriminated against”. As well as colliding, as Gallardón adduced, with the 2006 UN Convention on the rights of the disabled, which is also included in the text of the appeal.

After arguing, also, that the Time-limit Law did not respond to social demand, and that abortion “can’t be considered a right”, the only point that will be modified in the current regulation is that which discusses those younger than 16 and 17, so that parental consent is required.