The Constitutional Court (TC) has given the green light to the abortion deadline law approved in 2010 by the socialist government of Jose Luis Rodriguez Zapatero and appealed by the PP in June of that same year. The first consideration that should be made is to congratulate oneself on the decision of the court, which ends with more than a decade of uncertainty. The second aspect is to highlight the shameful delay of the sentence, which has taken almost 13 years to produce. Now, in view of the result of the vote, seven votes against four, it must be taken into account that such a long delay has served in the end for a court with a progressive majority to reject the appeal of the PP that, with a conservative majority in the TC , perhaps he would have had a chance of being partially admitted.
In fact, the four magistrates attached to the conservative sector voted against the constitutionality of the appealed law, including the rapporteur of the sentence, Enrique Arnaldo. His draft accepted the law of terms, but considered unconstitutional minor aspects such as the written information provided to women who wanted an abortion, which he considered insufficient, and claimed that it should also be verbal; He called for conscientious objection to cover all those involved in abortion, not just doctors, and proposed that abortion for malformations of the fetus should not be based on the concept of “social health.” When considering the majority of the TC that there was no unconstitutional point, she will be the vice president Immaculate Montalbanfrom the progressive sector, who will write the new paper, after resigning Arnaldo.
The time limits law replaced the previous one from 1985, which only allowed abortion in three cases: rape, malformations in the fetus or serious risk to the physical or mental health of the mother. The vast majority of abortions were carried out for the third course, with the legal uncertainty that meant the permanent risk that the woman or the doctors could be denounced and end up charged for taking advantage of such an indefinite course. Now, the sentence consecrates the right of womenwithout any external condition or requirement, to interrupt the pregnancy up to 14 weeks and even up to 22 for therapeutic reasons.
The PP, through the mouth of Alberto Núñez Feijóo, has reacted well, accepting the law of deadlines for the “evolution of society”, but its rectification comes as late as the sentence because the party could have withdrawn the appeal in these 13 years and did not. Nor, it is true, did it repeal the law when it had an absolute majority and only rectified the possibility that girls under 16 and 17 years of age could have an abortion without parental permission.
In any case, so much time has passed that the sentence occurs when there is already another abortion law approved by Congress and the Senate and it only remains to return to Congress to approve it definitively. In it, the abortion of minors without permission is recovered and it is established that there is at least one public center that offers the service in each provincial capital. It is possible that Vox will appeal the new law to the TC. If this happens, the court should rule in the same sense as now, shielding the freedom of decision of the woman. But without waiting so long to pass sentence.