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Believers urge Spain for outright abortion ban
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Tens of thousands of Roman Catholics joined in an open-air mass in Madrid yesterday to mark the Holy Family, just days after the government agreed to tighten the abortion law.
As large crowds of believers packed the central Plaza de Colon square, many of them urged the Spanish government to go even further and implement an outright abortion ban without exceptions.
Madrid Archbishop Antonio Maria Rouco Varela lamented that Christian families were confronted by a public concept of personal life characterized by “transience.”
“Not even the gift of life is understood as being definitive and inviolable and, therefore, neither is the gift of love,” he told the congregation.
Under pressure from the Church, Prime Minister Mariano Rajoy’s conservative government said on December 20 it would roll back a 2010 law that had allowed women to opt freely for abortion in the first 14 weeks of pregnancy.
The new law, yet to pass parliament where the ruling Popular Party enjoys an absolute majority, would allow abortion only in cases of rape or a threat to the physical or psychological health of the mother.
Elena Valenciano, deputy head of the opposition Socialist Party, said Varela had been the first to congratulate the government on its new abortion legislation.
“The Catholic hierarchy in Spain has always wanted, as it has done for centuries, to govern the sexuality and uterus of women, who bishops have always distrusted,” she said.
But as the faithful in Madrid sang hymns and waved banners from regions across Spain and other nations including France and Italy, some said the government must take more drastic action.
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