anti-abortionists could be sentenced to prison for “harassment”

The Spanish Senate definitively adopted, on Wednesday April 7, a reform of the Penal Code allowing the sentencing to prison of anti-abortion activists guilty of “harassment” against women wishing to have an abortion. They could receive sentences ranging from three months to a year, or community service for having “Obstacle to the exercise of the right to voluntary termination of pregnancy” via “annoying, offensive, intimidating or pressuring acts”. Harassment of nursing staff will be punished with the same penalties.

The socialist party of Spanish Prime Minister, Pedro Sanchez, was behind this text. According to a 2018 report by the Association of Clinics Authorized to Perform Abortion (ACAI), 89% of women wanting an abortion in Spain felt harassed and 66% threatened.

Abortion was decriminalized in Spain in 1985, but it was not until 2010 that the country legalized abortion without medical justification up to 14 weeks after the last menstrual period (amenorrhea). Abortion remains a right strewn with pitfalls in this country with a strong Catholic tradition, where doctors’ conscientious objection is massive and where anti-abortion movements are very active. These groups frequently meet in front of clinics to try to convince women not to have abortions by showing them plastic fetuses or putting them in vehicles equipped with ultrasound machines.