The Fight for Reproductive Rights in Spain: Our Struggle Is Yours

[ismnotwasm]

This sounds so familiar. And isn't it interesting Spain at least partially liberalized itself after a dictatorship, conservatives are trying to turn back the clock?

The government’s conservative agenda has downplayed the issue of gender violence, despite some very disturbing numbers. In the last ten years, up to 700 women have died in Spain because of domestic violence. And up to 22 percent of women reportedly have suffered abuse at the hands of their partners, according to a recent survey by the European Union. Clearly, this problem persists but rarely appears in Spanish conservatives’ public discourse.

But, without a doubt, the biggest setback we are experiencing, the most disturbing, is the attempt to suppress the right of women to freely terminate a pregnancy. After experiencing years of progress under progressive governments, in 2010 Spain passed a law that bans abortion after 14 weeks’ gestation. This law, similar to those passed in the United States, has reduced the number of abortions practiced in Spain and has significant public support. Also like in the United States, among medical professionals there is a widespread opposition to the restriction on the right of women to safe, legal abortion.

The conservative government now intends to repeal this law and replace it with a new one that would make abortion a crime, except in cases of rape or to protect the life or physical or mental health of the pregnant person. Women, then, are treated as minors in that their decision to terminate a pregnancy must be approved as appropriate by a judge, doctor, or psychiatrist, a humiliating process for someone who already is suffering enough.

According to reports, 90 percent of abortions currently practiced in Spain would be illegal under the law the government wants to pass. The only alternative that a Spanish woman with resources would have is to travel to neighboring countries—Portugal, Great Britain, or France, for instance—where abortion is not a crime. But in a country with 26 percent unemployment and a third of children at risk of poverty, many women would be forced to risk their lives—again, like during Franco dictatorship—in a clandestine clinic.

http://rhrealitycheck.org/article/2014/04/08/fight-reproductive-rights-spain-struggle/

[theHandpuppet]

1. "Women on the Waves"

http://www.laweekly.com/publicspectacle/2014/03/18/to-fed-up-texans-pro-choice-doc-vessel-was-the-best-of-sxsw
LA Weekly
To Fed-Up Texans, Pro-Choice Doc Vessel Was the Best of SXSW
By Amy Nicholson
Tue, Mar 18, 2014

The Texas State Capitol is just three blocks north of the State Theater. If you stretch your legs between movies during SXSW, you could squint up the appropriately named Congress Street and see the small, green park that climbs to the Capitol's dome. And at the world premiere of Diana Whitten's Vessel, a rousing pro-choice doc about a Dutch activist who sails to countries that have outlawed abortions and gives women medical care in international waters, the audience made sure the legislators next door could hear their standing ovation.

Dr. Rebecca Gomperts, the star of Vessel, founded Women on Waves in 1999. Now 47, she's still girlishly spry and as stubborn as a battle-tested general - which, in a way, she is. When she attempted to dock in Portugal, the government sent two battleships to block her entrance. When she landed in Valencia, Spain, ragtag pro-life pirates leapt onboard, tied her ship to theirs, and tried to drag her out to see. Gomperts grabbed a knife, cut their rope, and skipped around the deck waving at her supporters. By the second time we see Moroccan men scream in her face, we've stopped being scared for her: Gomperts is brave and ready to brawl.

If you watched Vessel in Los Angeles, you'd think it was a stirring film about trying to modernize religiously anchored countries like Ecuador and Ireland - you know, the others. Watching Vessel in Texas, however, feels immediate. The backhanded House Bill 2 has used concocted loopholes to shutter a third of the state's abortion clinics. Ninety-three percent of Texas counties don't have a clinic at all, and next year, when the second noose tightens, that number will get even higher. That means in the 15 years that Women on Waves' unrepentantly loud activism has convinced Portugal to legalize abortion and made pro-choice voters the majority in Poland, America has constricted the rights of women here at home.... MORE

[ismnotwasm]

2. Love that organization

If I was free to do what I want, I think I'd join it