Spain Has More Than 1.1 Million Abortions Since Legalization in 1985 
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by Steven Ertelt
LifeNews.com Editor
August 21, 2007
Madrid, Spain (LifeNews.com) — Spain has become an abortion capital ever since the Catholic nation’s parliament legalized abortion in 1985. That’s the report of a policy research group which also found that more than 1.1 million abortions have been done there during the last 22 years.
The Institute for Family Policy in Spain says abortion has reached an epidemic in the country because the numbers of abortions there are so high.
According to IFP’s research, the number of abortions there has more than doubled in the last ten years, posting an increase of 90.5 percent. That puts Spain third, behind Belgium and Holland, with the greatest increase in the abortion rate during that time.
About 97,000 abortions took place in 2006, the group reported, which is a six percent increase from the 2005 figures.
“If this trend continues, in 2010 one out of every five pregnancies (125,000 annually) will end in abortion,” IFP president Eduardo Hertfelder said in the report.
Some “266 children are not born each day in Spain because of abortion, resulting in one abortion taking place every 5.4 minutes.”
“The Ministry of Health must drastically re-orient its health and sexuality policies once their ineffectiveness has been made clear in order to stop or lessen this significant increase of abortions, which results in 266 deaths by abortion each day in Spain, making it the leading cause of mortality in Spain,” Hertfelder added.
According to the ACI Prensa news agency, he called the government’s policies “obsolete and erroneous."
Hertfelder said the government of Spain fails to recognize that 96.7 percent of abortions take place for so-called mental health reasons, rather than because the pregnancy is a threat to the mother’s life or health.
The analysis is the second time Spain has been called an "abortion mecca."
Carlos Valdes, the assistant director of the Life Foundation in Spain, used that term in May to describe Madrid and said private abortion businesses there are flourishing. He said abortion "is a growing private business in the Community of Madrid."
Accord to Valdes, 9.2% of women who get abortions in Madrid come from other countries.
Valdes also said there was a greater reliance on taxpayer funds to finance the abortions and that, in 2005, 21.5% of abortions were funded by public funds up from 20% the previous year.
“Only in the administration of the Community of Madrid do we see a certain sensitivity, while the Ministry of Health is only concerned with increasing the number of abortions among the youngest women," he told CNA.
“The public state administration does not offer solutions” he emphasized, and “it is incapable of reducing the number of abortions.”
Pro-life advocates are also distressed that Spain has exported its pro-abortion culture to its neighbor Portugal.
An abortion practitioner in Spain has opened the first private abortion business in Portugal now that the western European nation has legalized abortion. The new law allowing abortions up to 10 weeks into the pregnancy went into effect on July 15 despite a handful of Portuguese citizens voting for it.
Related web sites:
Institute for Family Policies – https://www.ipfe.org/entrada.htm
