The Government of Murcia wants to approve abortion by law "as a failure"

The president of Murcia Fernando López Miras (PP) published last Sunday a tweet in which he talked about abortion "not as a right but as a failure". This idea is included in the Law of Integral Protection of the Family of the Region of Murcia that the regional government wants to approve this month and announced last May during the International Day of Families. And, on the phone, repeat that publication on social networks. "It is legally regulated and we can not deregulate, but ethically and morally it is being treated as a right and it is not, it is a failure and in that sense I will legislate, as far as my capacity to do so". It is the same line in which it has been pronounced for months Teodoro García Egea, general secretary of the PP, who defends the family "without complexes" and who, in an interview with the agency Efe last September, argued that the party's position is sustained, among other things, in that "abortion is not a right, it is a drama" .

Law of Integral Protection of the Family of the Region of Murcia to defend the family as a pillar of every society.

✅Freedom of parents to choose the education of their children

✅ Abortion is not a right but a failure ... they are some of the measures of the law.??-FLM pic.twitter.com/ZODyDuY910

- Fernando López Miras (@LopezMirasF) October 21, 2018

Neither the PSOE nor Podemos in the region share the intention of the Murcian president. Francisco Lucas, spokesman and deputy secretary general socialist, believes that this only leaves "ridicule" to the region and notes that they completely ignore the situation: "Abortion is a consolidated right and an overdue debate. Here the only failure is of those who want to eliminate the rights of women. "

María Ángeles García, from Podemos, says that this is a retrograde vision of women's freedom and rights: "It seems that they want to compete with Vox and Citizens trying to impose their minority way of thinking and understanding family and life to a social majority ". And, he adds, this is just another added to the already precarious situation of Murcia. According to the latest official data, of 2016, the region is the fifth with the most abortions, ahead of Asturias, the Balearic Islands, the Canary Islands and Madrid.: 10.82 out of every 1,000 women between 15 and 44 years old. According to García, those who abort have to do it in private clinics, because "those who request to be treated in a public center are referred to other communities, there is no public center that practices them".

Political parties are not the only ones that have been positioned against, so have collective and feminist associations. From the Colombine Platform of Women Journalists of the Region of Murcia They believe that it is "unacceptable". Marta Garrido, her spokesperson, says that they will face those who want to push back the rights of women: "In Spain for years we have fortunately overcome this situation, it is unbelievable that a political party even considers going back". And he points out that to call abortion a failure is "to call the thousands of women who for various reasons have had to suffer it a failure, a lack of respect completely out of place and of unnecessary cruelty". For the platform, the real failure is that the law of 2010 is not fulfilled "due to the lack of will of our managers".

President López Miras affirms that they are convinced that if women had all the information and tools at their disposal "they would never reach the trauma and drama that implies abortion". Something Violante Tomás, the counselor of Family and Equal Opportunities, expands: "Most of them are doomed to do so because they do not have a handhold: a couple, a family or a job, so, in reality, they do not do it freely, the circumstances that surround them and that decision goes even against what they want ".

To make that statement, Tomás points to the data of an association with which they maintain a collaboration, it is the RedMadre Foundation, a pro-life collective present in 40 provinces that receives public subsidies for several years. From the group give data: in 2017, attended 102 women in Murcia, and 18,607 nationwide. "These are the figures that we use and those we passed to the Government of Murcia, since we started in 2007, we have served 86,512."

Abortion and the Popular Party

In Spain, it is regulated by the Organic Law on sexual and reproductive health and the voluntary interruption of pregnancy which came into force in July 2010 - known as the law of terms - which remains in force despite the attempts of the Popular Party to return to the law of 1985 assumptions. This speech on the popular abortion is not new.

First they were Soraya Sáenz de Santamaría and Federico Trillo, in 2010, comparing the law of terms of the PSOE with the race selection of the Nazis for allowing abortion when the fetus suffers malformation. A year later, the popular government began to receive pressure from anti-abortion groups near the church and the PP and it was possible to talk about a possible reform of the socialist law. With Gallardón as Minister of Justice, the Government of Mariano Rajoy approved the most restrictive abortion law of democracy, was in December 2013. A three-decade setback that not only returned to the 1985 legislation, but also restricted it further; They eliminated, for example, severe malformations in the fetus. That ended with the dismissal of Gallardón and the withdrawal of the rule just a few months later.

However, during the Popular Congress in which Pablo Casado was elected as the new president of the party last July, "the right to life" returned to take shape. On the one hand, Casado warned that Zapatero's law did not like him: "And we are going to modify it. We want to go back to the 1985 law. Abortion is not a right. It can not be a free bar and a queue as with this law. "And on the other with the general line that leads "without complexes" Teodoro García Egea, secretary general of the PP: defense of the family, "life" and "drama" and not the right that implies abortion.