Crusade Against Reproductive Freedom

We must respect Gallardon’s values on abortion as long as he confines their application to his own private life, but using the coercive apparatus of the state to serve Catholic morality is not acceptable.

India’s Prime Minister, the Sikh Manmohan Singh, always wears a turban. The Sikhs believe that our hair is part of our physical nature, that it grows by the grace of God and therefore we have no business cutting it. They never cut their hair, preferring to pile it on top of the head and cover it with a turban. In short, the Sikhs prohibit the cutting of hair, but the ban applies only to themselves, not to others. Sikhism is a tolerant religion, and Singh is one of the most widely respected leaders in the world today. He is a head of government and never cuts his own hair, yet he would not dream of using a political decree to either prohibit the cutting of hair or impose the wearing of a turban. Singh is a true democrat who makes no attempt to abuse the state’s monopoly on legitimate violence in order to impose the opinions and values of his own sect on citizens with contrasting views.

Jose Luis Rodriguez Zapatero’s government made many mistakes but did get some things right, like the 2012 law that decriminalized the practice of elective abortion during the first 14 weeks of pregnancy. This moderate and hardly innovative law did no more than bring Spanish legislation into line with the norm throughout Europe — except Ireland and Poland, which remain stonewalled by tremendous ecclesiastical interference — and almost all the developed world, from the United States and Canada across to China and Japan, and including, among others, India, Russia, Great Britain, Germany, France and Italy.

The choice whether to become a mother or have an abortion belongs to the mother, not to the minister or the bishop in power.

During his tenure as mayor of Madrid, Alberto Ruiz-Gallardon made headlines as the most extravagant mayor in Spain, creating the highest deficits, the greatest number of unpaid commitments to suppliers and a fourfold increase in the city’s debt to six times the size of Barcelona’s. It is surprising that a government like Rajoy’s, so focused on deficit reduction, should have rewarded him with a Cabinet position. It is astonishing that it is allowing him to divert political attention away from solving the current grave economic crisis and toward anachronistic, ecclesiastical demands on abortion.

Immediately after assuming office, Gallardon announced a crusade against women who wished to exercise their right to reproductive freedom. Decisions about pregnancy are not to be taken by pregnant women, but by bishops as in Ireland, where women are forced to travel to England to have an abortion. He subsequently indicated casually that he would not jail women who sought an abortion — though whether or not he would pay for the trip to England remained unclear — because women were in fact the victims. If Gallardon’s plans come to fruition, women will surely become victims of his policies. We must all respect the minister’s fundamentalist Catholic convictions, so long as he confines himself to applying them to himself and his co-religionists, following Singh’s example in India. What is not acceptable is his attempt to use the coercive apparatus of the state to impose Catholic morality on non-Catholics.

In humans, uterine development takes around 39 weeks. The first eight weeks are termed the embryonic stage, during which period more than a third of embryos miscarry without the mother even being aware of it. The majority of induced abortions — 70 percent in England — also take place during the embryonic stage.

From the ninth week, the embryo is termed a fetus. The fetus, initially weighing around eight grams, continues to grow and develop until its birth. The brain’s thalamocortical connections, essential for the later development of perception and feelings, do not begin to form until 28 weeks. It is therefore certain that in the first 14 weeks there is no possibility whatever of psychic activity or emotional life. Naturally, the embryo is a living creature, but so are mosquitoes and even bacteria.

The majority of women who get pregnant wish to continue their pregnancy and give birth to a healthy baby; that baby is the most important thing in the world for them. Abortion is always traumatic and no woman would go into it lightly. The creation of a new human being is an extraordinary miracle, but the choice of the right moment to produce miracles in a woman’s womb belongs to the woman in question, not to the minister or bishop in power at the time. Accordingly, nearly all the developed countries have adopted abortion term limits similar to those provided for under current Spanish law. There is no reason to change it.

The Christian far right is obsessed with celebrating malformation as a divine test.

Particularly disturbing are Gallardon’s assertions that parents unfortunate enough to have conceived a seriously abnormal fetus should be obliged to carry the pregnancy to term, thus condemning the parents, the child and society to incalculable useless, hopeless suffering. One of the great advances of the civilized world is that mothers are now able to choose to seek an elective abortion if they have the misfortune to conceive a malformed embryo that fails to follow the usual pattern and abort spontaneously. As a Valencian woman recently declared after choosing to abort a fetus affected with Down syndrome and several other malformations, “I prefer to cry for a month than be crying for the rest of my life.” Naturally, parents who choose to carry a defective fetus to term and wish to give up their lives to raise it deserve every respect and support, but this is not the generally preferred option of the majority of reasonable people in any country in the world. Parents who prefer to have children able to live human life to the full also have the right to abort and throw again when the genetic dice have rolled against them. The conception and gestation of a child are too important to be left to chance. In any case, the decision belongs to the parents, not Gallardon.

The Republican Party in the United States and the Spanish Partido Popular are equally heterogeneous. Conservatives and libertarians rub shoulders with a far-right Christian faction that is obsessively concerned with women’s reproductive freedom and celebrates fetal disease and abnormalities as tests sent by God so that we suffer in this vale of tears. The investment we make in earthly suffering will be compensated in the afterlife by 100 to one; God will deliver us from these insurances against the day of reckoning and his holy card scam.* The Republicans have lost the last two elections partly because of the Christian far right, which attracts extremist voters in the primaries but deters the moderate majority.

Sarah Palin, who was the Republican McCain’s running mate in the 2008 elections, has always flaunted her decision not to abort her Down syndrome fetus, Trig. She won huge popularity among the fanatical anti-abortionists but ultimately took votes away from McCain, who lost the election. In the most recent 2012 elections, Rick Santorum of the extreme religious right was poised to snatch the Republican candidacy from Mitt Romney. Santorum’s rhetoric had Romney against the ropes, compelling the moderate Romney to adopt more extreme positions than those he would normally defend, which ultimately reduced his wider public appeal. Santorum’s program became little more than a glorification of suffering, disease and malformation. Not only did he unsuccessfully oppose all abortion, even subsequent to rape, he has even dedicated his own life to the cause. His son Gabriel was an unviable fetus who was born prematurely at 20 weeks and died immediately. All the same, Santorum and his wife undertook to sleep with the corpse in the hospital, then took it home and introduced it to their other children as their “brother Gabriel.” In 2008 they insisted on carrying their daughter Isabella to term against medical advice; she was born with serious abnormalities caused by the deadly Trisomy 18, a condition caused by a baby having three copies of the eighteenth chromosome instead of the usual two. The poor child has spent her short life in and out of surgery. On the other hand, both Palin and Santorum are zealous warmongers, defenders of any and all wars, and avid supporters of the pro-gun lobby and the National Rifle Association.

* Translator’s Note: The Spanish equivalent of the “pigeon drop,” the holy card scam is a well-known street scam in which the mark is persuaded to part with a small sum of money in order to secure a larger sum.