Thirteen years after its promulgation, the Constitutional Court has endorsed today Wednesday the entire current abortion law, the work of the Government of Jose Luis Rodriguez Zapaterorejecting the appeal filed by the Popular Group of the Congress of Deputies in 2010. It has done so by seven votes to four, thus freeing itself from the oldest matter that was still in its hands.
The decision, which EL ESPAÑOL supports, will help remove from the political debate an issue that is currently amortized by Spanish society and that is only agitated by some extreme sectors of anti-abortionism in favor of its total or almost total ban. The moral debate on abortion will undoubtedly continue for many years, and it is healthy that this is the case in a modern society like Spain’s.
But the political debate closes today.
It is symptomatic, in any case, that it took the renewal of the Constitutional majorities to unblock an issue that the conservative sector had left to languish in a drawer for more than a decade. Partly because not even the PP, promoter of the resource, was interested in reviving a debate that could only harm it electorally. And that whether the court’s resolution was positive or negative.
Nor is it a good sign that the Court has been divided in a proportion so different from that of the majority consensus of Spanish society around the current law on deadlines. Something that could encourage that idea, spread by populists and nationalists, that the Constitution does not adequately represent the social majorities.
Of the four disagreeing, three of them (Ricardo Enriquez, Cesar Tolosa and Enrique Arnaldo) have considered that the law does not guarantee adequate informed consent for the protection of prenatal life. The fourth, Concepcion Espejelhas considered that the system of terms, and other aspects of the norm, do not fit in the Constitution
Nor will the evidence that the new majority have been able to unblock the abortion appeal in just a few weeks after thirteen years of paralysis help to avoid the idea of a politicized Constitutional. If all that was needed was will, why and for what purpose has that will not existed since 2010?
Finally, it is regrettable that the Constitutional rulings are delayed for years to the point of losing all their meaning and purpose. Neither the PP of 2023 is the same as that of 2010, nor is the abortion law the subject of debate today as it was then, nor is it convenient for a polarized society like the Spanish one for issues like this to languish in the constitutional limbo, unresolved, while the Tempers sour and the most extremists find excuses in this delay to encourage division.
The endorsement of the current abortion law also occurs when Parliament is about to approve a new rule that defines abortion as “a right” and that eliminates the three-day reflection period, as well as the mandatory prior information , with the aim of avoiding what Vox has tried to do in Castilla y León: offer them the “option” of listening to the fetal heartbeat or seeing a 4D ultrasound of the fetus.
Filed under Opinion Editorials, Abortion Law, Opinion, Popular Party (PP), Constitutional Court
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