Today the draft of the new abortion law arrives at the Council of Ministers. Since its decriminalization in 1985, the regulations on the voluntary interruption of pregnancy have undergone successive changes. The most important ones proposed now, according to the debate on the new text, have been those related to the minimum age for abortion, the charge to the State of sick leave due to painful periods or the one related to the possibility of advancing sick leave due to pregnancy .
The lowering of the minimum age for abortion without parental permission to 16 years is, understandably, one of the aspects that has sparked the most discussion, given the emotional and vital impact of abortion on an adolescent. Those who support it maintain that the girls in this trance must be able to act freely, without submitting to the paternal design on the convenience of continuing the pregnancy or not. Those who criticize it affirm that parents can be, in this situation, a capital support, and are surprised that, although you have to be 16 years old to practice consensual sex, at that age you still need parental permission to work. and you cannot vote, which suggests an incomplete degree of personal evolution, perhaps inadequate to decide on abortion.
Regarding the payment of casualties due to the painful rule, which Irene Montero presents as an achievement of her Ministry of Equality, there may well be some progress. Up to 15% of women suffer from dysmenorrhea, which can be disabling and cause discrimination in the workplace.
If the drop to 16 years for abortion and the approval of help for dysmenorrhea patients are presented by their promoters as social progress, other contents initially provided for in the law have ended up falling in the ministerial debates. The economic reason is behind two of those falls. On the one hand, the non-reduction of VAT for intimate hygiene products. On the other hand, the refusal to advance sick leave from the 39th week of pregnancy to the 36th. These were two claims that would have entailed considerable economic costs, apparently unaffordable at the present juncture.
The legislation on abortion generates a lot of social debate, due, among other reasons, to the clash between confessional and feminist sectors. The Constitutional Court still has pending the ruling on an appeal by the PP to the 2010 abortion law. The transformation of these norms must find a depoliticized balance between common sense and an attentive sensitivity to social evolution.
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