Citing Persecution, Spanish Abortion Clinics Go on Strike

[Omaha Steve]

Cross posted in labor

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/01/09/world/europe/09spain.html?_r=1&oref=slogin

By VICTORIA BURNETT
Published: January 9, 2008

MADRID — Private clinics in Spain, which perform most of the country’s abortions, began a five-day strike on Tuesday to protest what they said was persecution by anti-abortion campaigners and government inspectors, who have swept clinics in recent weeks to crack down on illegal terminations.

The strike, which involves about 40 clinics, 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 ahead of 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 it. 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 22 weeks of pregnancy if there is a risk of fetal malformation and the first 12 weeks in cases of rape. However, they are allowed to abort at any point if they can demonstrate that their mental or physical health is at risk.

Ms. García said the central government had done nothing to protect abortion clinics or patients from a wave of aggressive protests by anti-abortion campaigners 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 secretly filmed by a Danish journalist apparently agreeing to her request for an abortion in her seventh month. Dr. Morín is in jail, according to local news reports.

FULL story at link.

[Donald Ian Rankin]

1. To protest at people trying to stop them performing abortions,

they're going to stop performing abortions? That strikes me as possibly counterintuitive.