The Constitutional Court has declared the final constitutionality of the abortion law passed by the government of José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero in 2010, with a ruling approved Tuesday, May 9, in а plenary session, rejecting the PP’s appeal, enshrining abortion as a woman’s “right” that can be requested from public administrations. Thirteen years after the liberalization of easy abortion, the Constitutional Court, with new members appointed by Prime Minister Sanchez’s social-communist government, confirmed the legality of that rule.
According to sources leaked in the final hours of Tuesday, the legal rule was supported by a majority of 7 magistrates — those from the progressive bloc — against 4 — those from the “conservative” wing of the court. The four “conservative” magistrates announced a dissenting vote to disassociate themselves from the ruling, so the Court plenary approved the report prepared by Vice President of the Constitutional Court Inmaculada Montalbán. This 2010 law has led to the implementation of the time limit system, establishing a 22-week limit for an abortion. Now, according to the Constitutional Court, it establishes abortion as a woman’s “right.” Not as a new fundamental right, they explain, but as part of the right to personal integrity and, in this sense, to free self-determination, following the line drawn in the ruling on the euthanasia law.
As in that ruling, the Constitutional Court gives it a service content to ensure that the exercise of this “right” can be required of government departments. The ruling drafted by Montalbán represents a new approach; the new report does not deny the rights of the unborn child, but gives greater importance to those of the woman, as well as her well-being. The four conservative magistrates, Enrique Arnaldo, Ricardo Enríquez, César Tolosa and Concepción Espejel, distanced themselves from the ruling because the decision made by the majority “seriously exceeds… the scope and limits of the judicial review that corresponds to the Court.” In fact, the ruling discusses a 2010 law that has already been amended several times by other legislation and, “exceeding the scope and limits of constitutionality review that corresponds to this Court,” the approved text “comes to recognize a new constitutional right” called “a woman’s right to self-determination in matters of termination of pregnancy”, a purely made-up right that finds no foothold in the articles of the Spanish Constitution.
The recognition of new fundamental rights is a power of the constituent power, not of the constituted powers and therefore not of the Constitutional Court, nor of the simple majority vote of Parliament. This is an obvious one for any first-year student engaged in learning the basic principles of their country’s public and constitutional law. In addition, law as such , whether what we derive from natural law or positive law, is imposed in democratic society and civilization as a means of protecting the generality of the weaker against the stronger or the state itself. With this decision, unfortunately common in many countries ruled by liberal, socialist and communist political forces, the weakest (conceived and unborn babies) are instead sacrificed on the altar of the right of the strongest, in this case the mother. This marks the opposite of the social and civil evolution of Western societies, justifying and strengthening the right of the stronger against the weaker. A ‘social-communist’ infamy that endangers Spain’s democratic hold and legal and cultural civilization.