Upon learning of the decision of the Constitutional Court, although not final, to endorse the constitutionality of the abortion law, Alberto Núñez Feijóo did not raise any objections yesterday. On the contrary. “In today’s Spain, a law of terms is correct and constitutional,” said the leader of the Popular Party. He regretted, yes, the delay in addressing the appeal that his formation presented in 2010. Today, the institutional vice-secretary of the party, Esteban González Pons, has endorsed this speech, defending that it is the same position of the party since Mariano Rajoy reformed the law to include parental consent for minors aged 16 and 17 who wish to terminate the pregnancy.
The truth is, however, that the PP has been modulating its discourse and adopting different positions depending on the political context and the leadership leadership that has gone through the formation.
At the time of presenting the appeal before the Constitutional Court, when the Government of José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero approved the law, the PP asked the Constitutional Court to temporarily suspend the application of the contested precepts to avoid “obvious irreparable damage”. They claimed that it involved “human lives whose elimination would be irremediable if in the end the precepts that served as the basis for abortion are declared unconstitutional.”
This harsh speech against the norm promoted by the PSOE was maintained by Rajoy, before and after reaching the Executive. The one who would be president bet a year before the elections for a reform of the law, considering that he did not protect “sufficiently” the right to life because he gave “total freedom” to abort during the first 14 weeks of pregnancy. In the 2011 elections, in which the popular ones obtained an absolute majority, they included in the electoral program the commitment to change the norm. Already in Moncloa, the then Minister of Justice, Alberto Ruiz-Gallardón, took on the task of drawing up a new law.
The former mayor of Madrid defended the reform tooth and nail. “The freedom of motherhood is what makes women authentically women,” he went on to say in 2012. He also declared that women’s rights could not “absolutely prevail” over the “protection of the life of the conceived.” . He intended to return to Felipe González’s 1985 law of assumptions, and even wanted to eliminate one of them: fetal malformation.
Gallardón’s intentions raised blisters within the PP. The current president of the party, Alberto Núñez Feijóo, disagreed with the wording and demanded an adaptation to European legislation, closer to the 2010 deadline law than to the assumptions law. Leaders such as Jorge Fernández Díaz, who suggested that abortion “has something to do with ETA” at a press conference about the arrest of some suspected ETA members, did support Gallardón, when he was asked about this issue. The plan of the Ministry of Justice also had a strong social response.
Faced with this internal and external debate, Rajoy parked the law. He lowered his own expectations and proposed to include only the obligation for 16- and 17-year-old women to have to receive parental consent to terminate a pregnancy. The president’s decision led to the resignation of Gallardón, and the person who led the legislative modification -initially formulated by the chief executive- was his successor, Rafael Catalá, in 2015.
Despite the rejection shown through the appeal in the TC, the Popular Party did not get to repeal this law in the period 2011-2018, when it was in government. It was after the motion of no confidence against Mariano Rajoy and the changes in the direction of the formation, with Pablo Casado at the helm, that the party recovered this idea.
Already in 2018, the popular ones communicated the intention of introducing a law that would give “protection” to pregnant women. “Abortion is not a right, it is a drama”, asserted the then general secretary, Teodoro García Egea, thus explaining his distance from Zapatero’s deadline law. In 2019, an electoral year, Casado reiterated his desire to repeal the 2010 norm and vindicated the one approved by Felipe González. A few months later, he cooled a return to the law of assumptions and opted to promote a maternity law, aimed at ensuring that “the woman who decides to be a mother has all the public resources available to her.”
The change in criteria responded to a management of the internal balance of the training. She would later prove it again. He refused to “return to talking about the Penal Code” (the 1985 law decriminalized abortion) and defended the concept of “culture of life”, used by anti-abortion sectors.
With Núñez Feijóo in the leadership of the PP, the party recently voted against the reform of the abortion law, proposed by the Government of PSOE and United We Can, which this week has been endorsed by the Senate. This rule recovers the right of 16 and 17-year-old girls to abort without parental consent.
Last Wednesday, the Constitutional Court began the presentation of the appeal on the old law and gave it a temporary green light. For the moment, the popular ones assume the constitutionality of the law of terms and leave aside the term repeal that they had used in the past.
