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MADRID: Private clinics that perform most of Spanish abortions began a five-day strike Tuesday to protest what they said was persecution by government inspectors, who have swept the sector in recent weeks to crack down on illegal terminations, and by pro-life activists.The strike, which involves about 40 clinics across the country, revives a debate about Spain's abortion rules at an awkward moment for the Socialist government of José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero, which is trying to avoid inflammatory issues before elections in March.The strike could affect as many as 2,000 women, according to Francisca García Gallego, a regional director of the Association of Accredited Abortion Clinics, which organized the stoppage. She said striking clinics, which account for the majority of abortions in the country, would accept only emergency cases. The number of abortions in Spain has doubled in the past decade, to about 100,000 a year.Spain decriminalized abortion in 1985, and under current law women can have an abortion during the first 12 weeks of pregnancy in cases of rape and during the first 22 weeks if there is a risk of fetal malformation. But they are allowed to abort a pregnancy at any point if they can demonstrate their mental or physical health is at risk.García said the central government had done nothing to protect abortion clinics or patients from a wave of aggressive protests by pro-life activists and raids by the local authorities that resulted in a dozen arrests in December. In recent weeks, clinics had been vandalized and doctors and nurses insulted and, in one or two cases, hit by protesters, she said.The raids followed the arrest in December of Carlos Morín, a gynecologist who ran a group of clinics in Barcelona and who was filmed by a Danish television crew apparently offering to perform an abortion on a journalist who said she was seven months pregnant. Morín is currently in jail, according to local news reports.García said by telephone that cases of illegal abortion were extremely rare and that 90 percent of abortions in Spain happened in the first 12 weeks of pregnancy. Pro-life activists and conservative local officials seized on the Barcelona incident to demonize the sector, she said."There is a cloud of suspicion hanging over us ever since the Barcelona clinic was closed," she said. "We feel physically threatened, but nobody in the government has come out in our defense."Pro-choice advocates say the law should be more flexible, allowing women to terminate a pregnancy before a certain number of weeks on the basis of social or economic pressures. Critics say existing rules are routinely flouted by physicians who falsely certify a risk to a woman's mental health in order to provide cover for what would otherwise be an illegal operation.Zapatero said after the Barcelona arrests that an overhaul of the abortion law would be part of the government's election campaign, but he almost immediately backtracked, saying only that the law should be reassessed.http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/01/08/europe/spain.php
As in the days of Noah....
