Mario de Queiroz
LISBON, Oct 19 2006 (IPS) – With Thursday s approval of a motion by the governing Socialist Party to hold a referendum on the decriminalisation of abortion, the Portuguese parliament gave a green light to the battle to remove the country from the list of European nations with the strictest laws against abortion.
The result of the vote was expected, as the Socialist Party (PS) of Prime Minister José Sócrates has an absolute majority in parliament.
The proposal also received the support of the Left Bloc (former Trotskyists) and the conservative Social Democratic Party (PSD). The utranationalist Social Democratic Centre (CDS) abstained.
The Portuguese Communist Party (PCP) did not back the PS motion, arguing that a referendum is unnecessary, because the ruling party has enough support in the single-chamber parliament to pass legislation that would legalise abortion.
Women s rights activist Manuela Tavares said the task now is to fight to win the referendum, because we cannot continue to be judged for something that is our decision, which affects our lives and our bodies.
BI lawmaker Helena Pinto said that even though the CDS is doing all it can to keep prison terms in place for women found guilty of undergoing an abortion, women s dignity will certainly triumph in the referendum to be held in early 2007, and Portugal will stop being the most retrograde country in Europe.
Portugal s Catholic bishops conference, meeting Wednesday in the Santuario de Fátima, 120 km north of Lisbon, unexpectedly declined to make a public statement on the parliamentary vote. But the Church is expected to fight the decriminalisation of abortion, as it did in the previous referendum held on the issue, in 1998.
Thursday s vote was the culmination of a campaign launched Monday with the personal support of Sócrates, at an international conference organised by the Party of European Socialists (PES).
Spanish Prime Minister José Luís Rodríguez Zapatero, the most popular foreign leader in Portugal along with Brazilian President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, sent a message of support for Portuguese women, which was read out at the conference.
Sócrates said his party s proposal to make abortion legal up to the 10th week of pregnancy is reasonable, sensible and balanced, and reflects a consensus among Portuguese society. The referendum question proposed by the PS is Do you agree with the decriminalisation of abortion if it is performed in the first 10 weeks of pregnancy, at the request of the woman, in a legal medical establishment?
Should women who undergo an abortion before the 10th week of pregnancy go to prison? This is what is to be decided in the referendum, said Sócrates at the conference organised by the PES.
According to Sócrates, the referendum, which Portuguese President Aníbal Cavaco e Silva is to schedule for January or February, is aimed at putting an end to the persecution of women, the prison terms they risk if they undergo an abortion, and the blight of backstreet abortions.
Abortion trials have gone to the extreme of showing televised images of poor women, shamed and humiliated before the judge and the cameras, enjoying no respect at all for their privacy.
Portugal is one of the EU countries with the strictest laws against abortion. In Ireland, abortion is illegal except when there is a real and substantial risk to the life of the mother, while in Poland it is illegal unless the health of the mother or unborn child is in danger.
In Portugal, abortion is legal when the mother s life is at risk. It is also legal although only in the first 12 weeks of pregnancy if the fetus is deformed, or in case of rape.
However, Portugal is the only EU country where women who undergo an abortion face prison sentences, of up to three years, with the additional humiliation that the sentence is read out during a public trial.
The no vote triumphed in the 1998 referendum, aimed at making the country s legislation on abortion more flexible.
According to analysts, most women in Portugal, even those who hold conservative positions, see the coming referendum as a possibility to make the current law more moderate.
The law is staunchly defended only by the CDS, which even attempted unsuccessfully in 2002 to grant the unborn fetus the same legal status as a newborn.
In Austria, Belgium, Denmark, France, Germany, Greece, Italy, the Netherlands, Sweden and the United Kingdom, abortion is legal at the request of the woman until a deadline that varies between the 12th and 24th week of pregnancy.
In Finland and Luxembourg abortion is also legal, although a clear reason socioeconomic problems, health risk or rape must first be established.
In Spain, meanwhile, abortion is legal up to 12 weeks in cases of rape, a deformed fetus, or danger to the mother s life or mental health. But in practice, the mental health clause has resulted in abortion on demand, since psychiatrists routinely certify that the pregnant woman s mental health is in danger.
Thus, many Portuguese women travel to Spain to have an abortion.
In Spain, some 80,000 legal abortions are performed annually, mainly in private clinics, said Yolanda Hernández, director of the Los Arcos clinic in Badajoz, the city closest to the border in central Portugal. Thousands of women from Portugal visit the Los Arcos clinic every year.
In 2005, 4,000 women came to us from mainland Portugal and the islands (the Azores and Madeira archipelagos in the Atlantic Ocean). Most of them are between the ages of 19 and 31, and are middle-class or wealthy, 58 percent of them are single, and 62 percent were not using birth control, she told IPS.
Portuguese ob/gyn Miguel de Oliveira e Silva, who has written several books on abortion, told IPS that the main problem is the mentality of doctors in his country.
Neither the referendum nor a new law will change the mindset of Portuguese doctors, who refuse, on moral grounds, to carry out abortions in public hospitals, even in the limited cases in which they are permitted by law. That is why the Health Ministry has begun negotiations for the privatisation of abortion , he added.
But many doctors who are conscientious objectors in the morning, when they work in the public health services, are no longer in the afternoons, when they work in private health establishments, said Oliveira e Silva.
To this are added two other aspects: the very conservative code of Portuguese doctors, and the failure of sex education in Portugal, where many women are ignorant about their own bodies, he argued.
Hernández, 48, who has a business administration degree and opened her first clinic in 1992 in Mérida, in the western Spanish region of Extremadura along the Portuguese border, said abortion did not come out of the closet (in Portugal) until 1996; until then it was impossible even to talk about it.
For years, abortion was a taboo issue even among health professionals. But today it is discussed in the media, noted the businesswoman, who hopes to open her first clinic in Lisbon early next year.
But she said there are double standards in Portugal, because while in Spain an abortion costs between 335 and 500 euros (428 to 640 dollars), a Portuguese doctor charges between 750 and 1,000 euros (960 to 1,280 dollars), without taxes, for a clandestine abortion.
Deputy Francisco Louçã, the leader of the BI, said women who can afford it solve their problem without major difficulties, and they don t care about the medieval laws that prevail in Portugal.
But poor women, who cannot afford to get an abortion in Spain, face terrible humiliation, while they are treated as criminals and their faces are broadcast on TV around the country and even to the rest of the world.
