Abortion remained illegal, eleven women were convicted of abortion in 1982. One of them was sentenced to ten years in prison. The law did not change until 1985, when medically induced abortions were allowed if the mother`s life was in danger, if the pregnancy was the result of rape (within the first 12 weeks), or if the fetus had a malformation (within the first 22 weeks). [26] [8] [27] Criminal penalties were still imposed when abortions were performed outside these restrictions, including one to three years in prison for doctors with loss of license and six months to one year in prison or a fine for women. [26] [27] Between 1987 and 1989, 58,000 abortions took place in Spain. [8] The year 1979 was decisive for the right to abortion with the Bilbao trial (Spanish: Juicio de Bilbao). Ten women and one man were prosecuted for abortion. The prosecution has announced its intention to seek prison sentences of more than 100 years. Although the trial was originally announced on 26 October 1979, it did not take place until 1982 due to several suspensions. Nine of the women involved were acquitted. A man who ordered the abortions and a woman who performed them were convicted. The verdict was appealed, but the appeal was suspended several times before being heard in late 1983. Four women were acquitted, while six women and one man were sentenced to prison terms.
In the end, these seven people will eventually be pardoned by the state. [17] [6] Six of the affected women had serious medical conditions that would have put their pregnancies at risk. The court later concluded that therapeutic interventions for abortion were justified. [6] In 1982, a demonstration in support of the Bilbao Eleven took place in front of the Palau de la Generalitat in Barcelona. At that time, they had been in prison for six years. At least one woman had been denounced by her ex-husband. In addition to prison sentences, the prosecution attempted to disenfranchise the defendants. During the protest in Barcelona, police violently attacked protesters and inflicted head injuries on several women. [24] An amnesty petition for the Bilbao 11 was signed by more than 1,300 women, including politicians, singers, artists, and journalists, all of whom said they had had abortions as well. All but those who performed abortions were pardoned in 1982. [25] Following the Bilbao cases, the government ended attempts to prosecute women who had performed illegal abortions. [6] Eugenics in Spain in the late 1930s and 1940s was not based on race, but on people`s political orientation towards the regime.
Ricardo Campos explained: “The race issue in Franco`s era is complex.” He explained: “Despite the similarities of the Franco regime with Italian and German fascism and the interest aroused by eugenics, the strong Catholicism of the regime prevented the defense of eugenic policies practiced in Nazi Germany.” He added: “It was very difficult to biologically racialise the Spanish population because of the mixture that has been produced historically.” Vallejo-Nágera, in his 1937 work Eugenics of Hispanic and Regeneration of the Race, defined Hispanic around spirituality and religion. The goal was to “psychologically strengthen” the phenotype. Since Catholicism was against negative eugenics, the only way to combat degradation was to suppress abortion, euthanasia and contraception. [4] The PSOE introduced regulations to legalize abortion in 1983 through an amendment to the Spanish Penal Code. [6] Abortion was eventually legalized by Congress later that year by a vote of 186 to 50, but did not go into effect until July 1985, when the Coalición Popular (now Partido Popular) challenged its constitutionality. The decriminalization of abortion was allowed for three reasons. The first was that it was ethical in the case of rape, the second that it might be necessary to save the mother`s life, and the third was eugenic in allowing abortion in cases of fetal malformation. [17] [20] [18] [6] The three conditions that allowed abortion were criticized, particularly on maternal mental health grounds, as opponents of abortion believed that in practice they allowed abortion on demand, even though women were legally required to have a psychiatrist testify about their mental health problems before the procedure could be performed.
[20] [18] Other countries have legalized abortion at the same time. Italy legalized abortion in May 1981 following a referendum, while in Portugal, abortion was legalized by parliament in November 1982. [17] “She was in need, and I was with her afterwards, and she asked me, `This will happen soon, won`t it? I want this problem to go away,” Dr. Sobreviela recalled, saying the woman would have an abortion. This law is still in force today and abortions can be performed free of charge in public hospitals or in private hospitals for a fee of €300. However, a decade after ratification, abortion is still a hotly debated issue in Spain, and women face many obstacles to exercising their legal right to vote. Between 1940 and 1950, 44 abortions were reported in the province of Zaragoza. Of these, 29 were single women or widows. Court documents suggest that single women and widows aborted to avoid the shame of having a child out of wedlock.
[1] [16] Prostitution was widespread in Zaragoza in the 1940s and was tolerated by the local government. Nevertheless, prostitutes are often accused of bribery and abortion of minors, most of whom are themselves minors. Prostitutes were also the largest population probably responsible for birth control. Married women who have had abortions tend to do so as a form of birth control to limit the number of children in their families. Women in Zaragoza convicted of abortion used a network to get help, with 38 out of 44 cases involving the help of other women, including mothers, sisters, neighbors and friends. These women gave information, contacted the midwife or went with the woman to the midwife. Abortions have been performed with things like knitting needles, parsley stalks, vaginal irritants, physical trauma, tubes, mustard baths, or ingesting substances. Most of these methods have been transmitted to women through oral tradition. Where their community could be identified, 21 came from the city of Zaragoza and 15 from more rural areas.
This is despite the authorities` efforts to make it appear that rural areas were ideologically more in favour of her. In Luna, 10 women were convicted of abortions, in an extreme case of apparently coordinated efforts to cover up the existence of a minor prostitution ring. Most of the girls were unable to sign their own names when they were brought in by the Guardia Civil. [1] Abortion was first legalized in Spain in 1985 in cases of rape or bodily harm to the mother or child. This was largely attributed to another provision in the 2010 law that gave health professionals directly involved in the procedure the right to conscientious objection – in other words, to refuse to perform an abortion as long as they declared their refusal in advance and in writing. In theory, a person`s refusal to perform or support an abortion should not prevent a woman from having one, nor should it affect the quality of her care. However, since the state also specified that this personal decision of a doctor should not be used to “discriminate” against him in a future recruitment process, it was not always possible for hospitals to guarantee that the majority of their medical staff were willing to perform the abortion procedure. As a result, no official register has been kept of the names of conscientious objectors – neither by Spanish medical institutions nor by the government – in order to avoid the possibility of this type of discrimination. In Europe, the use of medical abortion is generally widespread, although their use varies from country to country.
In 2010, 67% of induced abortions took place in Portugal, 49% in France, 40% in the United Kingdom and 70% in Finland. [38] In Spain, it was only 4%; in Italy, less than 4 % since the start of marketing of mifepristone in December 2009. [38] [39] When the U.S. Supreme Court rendered Roe v. Wadeâ, which has guaranteed women in this country the right to abortion for 50 years, shockwaves have been sent to the United States and throughout the Western world. The verdict was exceptional in that it was a complete reversal of the Court`s precedent; a precedent that was upheld by other Supreme Court decisions in the following decades. The 2010 law stipulated that in exceptional cases, a woman could be referred to a private medical centre if the public health services were unable to perform the procedure in a timely manner. However, this “exception” has become the rule in most cases.