European Interest

Back to Spain’s 1985 abortion laws

Flickr/European People's Party/CC BY 2.0
Pablo Casado, President of Spain's People's Party with Manfred Weber, President of the EPP Group in the European Parliament, Madrid, January 18, 2019.

Pablo Casado, the president of Spain’s Popular Party (PP), has argued in favour of overhauling the country’s legislation on abortion. In fact, he wants to revert back to an 1985 law that allowed women to terminate pregnancy in very limited cases.

“If we want to fund pensions and healthcare we need to think about how to have more babies and not about how to have terminations,” said the conservative leader. He warned that Spain, with its ageing population, is facing “a demographic winter”.

As reported by Spain’s daily El País, Spain (in 2010) adopted legislation allowing abortion on demand during the first trimester.

There was an attempt in 2013 to repeal this law, but the initiative failed to gain political traction and its main sponsor, Alberto Ruiz-Gallardón of the PP, stepped down as justice minister in September 2014 as a result.

Now Casado, who promised a shift to the right when he became the new president of the PP in July of last year, says that he would like to roll back the 2010 law and go back to its 1985 predecessor, which he believes had broad social backing.

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