Sánchez Party Proposes Adding Abortion to Spanish Constitution

Abortion has been legal in Spain since 1985 but now the Reds want to enshrine it in the Constitution to protect the right to murder the unborn. 

From The European Conservative

By Bridget Ryder

The move is another distraction from the scandals and failures threatening to break the government.

Spain's socialists are aiming to make their country the next in Europe to enshrine legal abortion as a constitutional right. The Partido Socialista Obrero Español has proposed adding the right to voluntary interruption of pregnancy to the Spanish constitution, El Debate reports.

Abortion was partially decriminalized in Spain in 1985. In 2010 the allowance for abortion was expanded from 10 to 14 weeks of pregnancy. 

Abortion has become a hot political topic in Europe in the last decade. Most European countries had legalized abortion to one extent or another in the 1970s and 1980s but the 2000s saw a push in many parts of the continent to further liberalize abortion laws, galvanizing the pro-life movement on the continent and giving further impulse to the rise of new conservative political parties such as VOX.

As political and social debate heated up on the topic, left-leaning governments seem to be using abortion to score parliamentary wins to shore up their weak governments. This was the case in France last year, when President Emanuel Macron proposed adding the right to abortion to the French constitution, one of the few successful legislative initiatives of his second term as president.

In Spain, too, the socialist-led government, weak from the beginning, has gone from crisis to crisis and proven so far unable to pass any significant legislation. 

The socialists now seem to be taking a page out of the French playbook. But Spain is not France, and the move could potentially backfire on scandal-ridden prime minister Pedro Sánchez.