Spain's crisis of faith

Spain's controversial abortion law has been passed by the lower house of parliament and is now making its way through the Senate. Beyond parliament, however, a bitter conflict on the "ley del aborto" has torn open old wounds between the Catholic church and the ruling socialist party. Under the law's provisions, abortions would be available on demand for women of 16 and over up to the 14th week of pregnancy - and up to 22 weeks if there was a risk to the mother's health or if the foetus was deformed. Women could also undergo the procedure after 22 weeks if the foetus had a serious or incurable illness. However what has most angered the Catholic community - and even some supporters of the Spanish Socialist Workers' Party (PSOE) government - is a provision allowing girls of 16 to have an abortion without their parents' consent or knowledge. Opinion polls have shown that 56 per cent of socialists who support the liberal PSOE government are very unhappy at this clause, against 64 per cent opposition across Spain as a whole. The protests against the new abortion law have been led by Hazte Oir, a coalition of Catholic organisations. In October over a million people gathered in the Plaza de Independencia in Madrid to voice their opposition.

This highly motivated Catholic movement has been joined by the centre-right Partido Popular, which has pledged to ask the Constitutional Court to overturn the abortion legislation. PSOE policies have set Prime Minister Jose Luis Rodriguez Zapatero on a collision course with the Catholic church in Spain on numerous fronts, including divorce, gay rights and education. And the battle over the proposed abortion laws has become increasingly bitter since the church banned a leading PSOE member from taking communion. Staunch Catholic Jose Bono is president of the Spanish Congress and voted for the legislation. He argued in an interview that he supported the law because he understood it would reduce abortions and that, according to former pope John Paul II's guidance on the issue, "politicians can vote for laws governing abortion if they believe that they are reducing the evil it causes." But in a letter to daily newspaper El Mundo the Spanish Episcopal Conference stated that politicians were obliged to vote against any law which did not adequately protect the inviolable right to life of those who are yet to be born. This ongoing struggle has highlighted the suspicion with which many Spaniards view the Catholic church.

It was closely associated with the dictatorship of Franco, leading to deep distrust among generations of Spanish leftwingers. Students of the Spanish civil war well remember the role played by the Catholic caucus in the US to prevent president Franklin D Roosevelt from supporting the democratically elected government in Madrid. Catholic activists and writers also rubbished the press reports by Jay Allen on the nationalists' slaughter in Badajoz and George Steer's accounts of the destruction of Guernica, arguing they were communist inventions. Following the church's decision to bar Bono from receiving communion PSOE vice-secretary general Jose Blanco waded into the argument. Blanco accused the church of "hypocrisy," pointing out that it had taken no action against members of the former Partido Popular government of Jose Maria Aznar which introduced the present abortion law - "members of the government of the right under whom in our country there have been over 500,000 abortions."

And so the fight over the right to life of the unborn child has fired up old animosities, with socialists believing that the church favours its allies on the right above those on the left - even devout Catholics such as Bono. High-profile socialist Luis Solana, who was instrumental in establishing democracy after Franco, noted that socialists who are also practising Catholics have experienced "many bitter times." As far as the church is concerned the classic socialist is an agnostic, he said, hence those who follow both the Catholic and socialist creeds such as Bono are rejected by the hierarchy and should expect no charity. Back in October a local communist leader of the United Left (IU) Pedro Moreno Brenes explained his own relationship with Catholicism. Brenes, a lecturer in law at Malaga University and a Catholic, practises his faith openly alongside the political beliefs that he has held since adolescence. He said that his religion coexists with his political leanings and said that he felt no conflict whether he was invited to a religious or civil event, and was pleased to accept all invitations should they be from Muslim or Jewish communities or atheists. Asked about the antagonism between the IU and organised Catholicism, Brenes touched on another reason for the church's hostility towards the left. "The party, for example, proposes that there shouldn't be any tax privileges for religious entities. It is compatible in the respect of - and the separation of - public and religious life."

Brenes remained in no doubt that the Christian message of "love one another" is much the same as the communist belief in fraternity and equality. But while it may be compatible to be a Christian as well as a socialist or communist in Spain - where Catholicism is the only real Christian option - it seems that the Catholic church hierarchy views things very differently.

Why women need abortion rights

Thirty-seven years years after the U.S. Supreme Court's Roe v. Wade decision that legalized abortion, the myriad attacks on its availability has limited access to such an extent that women across the U.S. are turning to so-called do-it-yourself abortions. No governmental agency or private institution tracks the incidence of self-induced abortions. So it's left to anecdotal reports from health care providers, along with a few recent studies, to hint at what has become a dangerous pattern. "Our local hospital tells me they see 12 to 20 patients per year, who have already self-induced or had illegal abortions," said an administrator of a women's health clinic in the South. "Some make it, some don't. They are underage or poor women mostly, and a few daughters of pro-life families." In a 2006 interview with University of California-Davis professor Carole Joffe, the administrator described women risking cardiac arrest by swallowing whole bottles of quinine pills along with castor oil, and women who douche with a variety of dangerous chemical products in an attempt to terminate pregnancies. The administrator said that other abortion providers around the country also noticed a perceptible rise in the number of patients they were treating for complications from illegal abortions.

Outside the South, in cities like Boston and San Francisco, medical researchers are working to compile studies, conducted mostly among Latina women, to examine the prevalence and methods of self-induced abortions. A study by Planned Parenthood released earlier this year documented the methods used to induce abortion by immigrant women from the Dominican Republic, including "mixing malted beverages with aspirin, salt or nutmeg; throwing themselves down stairs or having people punch them in the stomach." These studies have focused primarily on Latina and immigrant women who, in addition to the obstacles of cost and fear of harassment by anti-abortion protesters, may face additional burdens of anti-abortion conservatism and mistrust of medical treatment in their communities--as well as the fear that going to a clinic or hospital might lead to questions about their immigration status. "In my Washington Heights clinic in northern Manhattan, I see at least one patient every week who has tried to end a pregnancy on her own," writes Anne Davis in a letter to the New York Times. "When lack of information, poverty or stigma overwhelm pregnant women, some take matters into their own hands."

With lawmakers debating provisions in health care legislation that would lead to insurance companies dropping elective abortion procedures from their coverage, it's easy to imagine that more and more women will feel it necessary to attempt to induce abortions on their own. At the same time, polls show that support for reproductive rights is reaching critically low levels. Gallup reported in May 2009 that for the first time, people self-identifying as pro-choice are a minority in the U.S.--its numbers show that only 42 percent of women consider themselves pro-choice, and a majority of respondents, whether they consider themselves pro-life or pro-choice, think that abortion should be legal, but only in certain circumstances. What's more, in the same week that Rep. Bart Stupak proposed his amendment to ban insurance plans that cover abortions from the new insurance exchange in the House health care legislation, poll figures from CNN/Opinion Research Corporation found a slim majority (51 percent) of people agree that women should have to pay the full cost of abortion procedures out of pocket legal attacks and ideological regression on the subject of reproductive freedom, it's worth stepping back to consider the reasons why abortion is a fundamental right for women. Women in the U.S. live in the intersection of a contradiction: a set of rigid, puritanical social and sexual mores functioning alongside a pervasive culture of sexism that objectifies and commodifies women's bodies and sexuality.

The mixed messages arrive early and carry significant consequences. For example, while 12- and 13-year-old girls regularly appear in hyper-sexualized advertising, particularly in fashion industry ads, federal and state governments continue to sponsor abstinence-only programs in schools. The Sexuality Information and Education Council of the United States (SEICUS) reported, "Between 1996 and federal fiscal year 2008, Congress funneled over $1.5 billion (through both federal and state matching funds) to abstinence-only-until-marriage programs." Such programs bar discussion of contraception or safe sex in favor of teaching that the only safe and acceptable sexual pairing is a heterosexual, married couple. SEICUS describes how "many abstinence-only-until-marriage programs rely on fear, shame and guilt to try to control young people's sexual behavior. These programs include negative messages about sexuality, distort information about condoms and STDs, and promote biases based on gender, sexual orientation, marriage, family structure and pregnancy options. "This approach also tends to treat all premarital sex as immoral, chosen behaviors, adding to the stigmatization and alienation of teens who have been victims of sexual assault and molestation. Though federal funds have subsidized abstinence-only-until-marriage programs since 1981, no data proves that such methods deter teens from having sex.

When researchers at the British Medical Journal examined the results of abstinence-only programs from 13 studies covering more than 16,000 people, they found rates of behaviors weren't quantitatively different in terms of "the rate of vaginal sex, number of sexual partners and condom use." And they found that "the rates of pregnancy and sexually transmitted diseases (STDs) among participants in abstinence-only-until-marriage programs were unaffected." In 2006, the Guttmacher Institute reported that 13 percent of teens aged 15 and under acknowledge having had sexual intercourse, as do seven out of 10 19-year-olds nationwide. To be sure, however, not all teens are in a rush to have to sex. The Kaiser Family Foundation found in 2005 that 24 percent of teens aged 15 to 17 said they had "done something sexual they didn't really want to do." Women and girls confront a mass media that constantly tells them their value is determined by their attractiveness and treats them as sexual objects. Yet horrible double standards that shame women for having sex--even non-consensual sex--still exert significant influence, as evidenced by a Chicago Tribune syndicated column by Amy Dickinson published in November.

Responding to young woman writing from Virginia who described being coerced into sex during a frat party, Dickinson wrote: "I hope your letter will be posted on college bulletin boards everywhere...You were a victim of your own awful judgment...Getting drunk at a frat house is a hazardous choice for anyone to make because of the risk (some might say a likelihood) that you will engage in unwise or unwanted sexual contact. In a similar way, women facing unintended pregnancies are offered little to no support. There are few programs to help women with the medical expenses of pregnancy and childbirth, let alone to subsidize child care, food, housing or any of the other expenses that present daunting challenges for working and poor mothers. The situation isn't helped by the fact that the recent recession led to reduced jobs, hours and benefits for working women as well as budget cuts in state programs for the poor."

Carol Joffe relates a story on her blog, RH Reality Check, that she characterizes as a dismal sign of the situation for women in the current economic crisis - the story of Starla Darling, a pregnant Ohio woman, who was informed she would soon lose her job and her health insurance. She rushed to a hospital, requested a medication to induce labor, and had an emergency Caesarean section, two days before her health insurance expired. Not only was Darling upset about having a C-section birth--"I was forced into something I did not want to do"--her insurance company refused to pay for the birth. Now this unemployed woman, two months behind on her rent, is facing medical bills of more than $17,000.

Banning abortion costs lives

On February 10th, a student group at the University of Washington (UW), Students for Human Life, set-up an anti-choice display on campus. The display consisted of makeshift gravestones with the names of women attached, as well as a short paragraph explaining how each of these women died due to complications during abortion procedures. The intended message behind this display was to convince passersby that abortions were harmful to women's health. However, the display really amounted to an attack on women's bodies and their right to control their own reproductive health. First of all, if the argument is that medical procedures that could result in injury or death of the patient should be criminalized, then this logic should be drawn out to its fullest conclusion. If you accept this premise, then you would also agree that not only should abortions be banned, but so should open-heart surgery, brain surgery, kidney transplants, blood transfusions, chemotherapy and a host of other "risky" operations.

However, the instances of death are rare in these cases, and the benefits far outweigh the potential costs. Similarly with abortions. In fact, abortions are one of the safest surgical procedures for women in the U.S. today. According to the Guttmacher Institute, less than 0.5 percent of women obtaining abortions experience any complications, and the risk of death associated with abortion is about one-tenth of that associated with caring the pregnancy to term. The display at the UW campus merely exaggerates a handful of cases that unfortunately ended in death of the patient, while ignoring the millions of cases in which women received safe abortions. Secondly, the display ultimately amounts to an argument for increasing funding for abortions, not decreasing funds or eliminating abortions altogether. If doctors or nurses made errors during procedures or equipment proved faulty, then the solution isn't to ban them from ever performing the procedure again. Instead, the solution is to make sure doctors and nurses have the best possible training and equipment to ensure the procedures go without a hitch. Reducing funding for abortion services will only result in more fatal procedures like those depicted.

Of course, the anti-choice Students for Human Life will argue that if reducing funding will lead to more deaths of women, then abortions should be banned completely. However, this argument overlooks the fact that criminalizing a behavior doesn't prevent that behavior from ever happening again. Banning abortions does not mean women will no longer seek out this important medical service. Instead, they would be forced to either find shady underground abortion clinics or self-induce abortions, both of which are extremely unsafe practices. Banning abortions will not save women's lives. Instead, the death rate for women undergoing the procedure will skyrocket (coat hanger, anyone?). Case in point: the exact death toll during the period when abortion was illegal in the U.S. is unknown, but some conservative estimates are as high as 10,000 per year. Compare this to a study in New York City in which, after abortion was legalized in 1970, maternal mortality dropped by 45 percent.

Reproductive freedom is a foundation of women's liberation. Women can never have full equality if they cannot control their own bodies, and we cannot have a fundamentally democratic society if half the population is denied this essential freedom. If Students for Human Life were truly concerned about the well-being of women, they would be fighting for increasing funding for abortion services and pressuring their congressional representatives to pass and enforce legislation that further protects women's right to abortions. Instead, Students for Human Life is arguing that they are protecting women's lives by taking away control of their own bodies. This is both condescending and paternalistic, and amounts to an attack on a woman's liberty. No one is more qualified to make a choice concerning a woman's reproductive health than the woman herself. As late abortion provider, Dr. George Tiller, commonly said, "trust women."