Feijóo: "Abortion is a right that a woman has within the law, and I am not going to change my mind"

Return to the starting box. After a week of hesitation and internal storm, the leader of the PP, Alberto Núñez Feijóo, has tried to settle the controversy generated by his position regarding the voluntary interruption of pregnancy. “Abortion is a right that women have within the law,” he said. “And I’m not going to change my mind,” he pointed out. Feijóo has thus recovered the position that he marked last January, when for the first time the main leader of the right-wing generally assumed the current law of deadlines.

Feijóo thus establishes the position of the PP, which until now maintained in its internal political documents that “abortion is not a right.” Thus he appears collected in the political presentation of 2017, with Mariano Rajoy at the head of the party. Pablo Casado did not change this position, and the current leader has chosen to evade ideological debates so as not to be contaminated before the electoral cycle of this 2023. That was also the phrase that his spokesperson, Borja Sémper, said this Monday.

But the controversy caused in Castilla y León by the anti-abortion medical protocol forced Feijóo to mark a new position so far in the PP. Later he ratified it in the face of the Constitutional Court’s rejection of the appeal against the 2010 deadline law: “The deadline law is well constructed, it is a correct, constitutional law. It deserves my respect. There are other neighboring areas in which we do not agree, but in today’s Spain a law of deadlines is a correct law”.

This Wednesday, Feijóo spoke to the media after visiting the Ronald McDonald House, a foster home for families from outside Madrid who have to move to the capital so that their children receive long-term medical treatment. They have been the first public statements by the PP leader since the most extreme part of his own party revolted against his words to the point of initially turning him around.

Sémper’s words last Monday were joined on Tuesday by the general secretary, Cuca Gamarra, who called abortion a “failure” for women.

Asked by the journalists, Feijóo said: “You know my opinion, I am not going to change my opinion.” The leader of the PP has assured that his intention is to “support all women in their maternity processes”, but that “they are not” going to “coerce any woman who wants to terminate her pregnancy in accordance with the law” . Just yesterday, Vox announced a non-legal proposal in Congress to implement throughout Spain the fetal heartbeat protocol that he announced, and withdrew, in Castilla y León.

“Is it necessary to regulate the voluntary interruption of pregnancy?” Feijóo asked. “Yes”, he has answered himself. “And support all the women who want to be a mother? Yes ”, he concluded.

Feijóo has continued that “in 23 EU countries there is regulation of abortion” and that in Spain “it has been in force for 13 years” without “neither the PP nor the PSOE have changed it”, beyond some aspects such as the conscientious objection of doctors, reflection periods or the most controversial issue for the Galician: abortion without parental consent in women aged 16 and 17. “The Constitutional Court will consider the law constitutional,” he added.

With these premises, Feijóo has propped up his position. “Abortion is an action, a decision by the woman that can only be adopted in accordance with the law,” he said. “I do not consider it to be a fundamental right because it is not included in the declaration of Human Rights”, she has assured. “It can be done in accordance with the legal frameworks”, she has reiterated, to insist once again: “Abortion is the right that a woman has within the law”.