Spain’s abortion debate has taken an unexpected turn, with pro-abortion activists campaigning against expanded support for expectant families because they argue it could lay the groundwork for future restrictions.
The dispute began after Madrid’s center-right People’s Party (PP) government introduced a law allowing families to claim certain benefits linked to family size before a child is born. The policy is hardly radical: it creates no new benefits, but simply lets families receive existing support around six months earlier so they can prepare for the birth and ease the financial pressures of pregnancy.
PP says this is a “sensible, useful, and necessary” measure to help boost the falling birth rate, and vowed to institute it nationally if it takes power next year from the current ruling coalition of the socialist PSOE and the far-left Sumar.
“The more births there are, the better, in Spain and in Madrid, and so we are incentivizing them,” explained Alfonso Serrano, secretary-general of PP Madrid. “Our social services, our pensions, depend on our national demographics, and you can’t solve that with immigration alone.”
Unable to attack the policy on its own merits, Spain’s Left, joined by human rights and women’s rights organisations, instead argued that the measure reveals the PP’s “anti-abortion agenda.”
According to Yolanda Besteiro, the president of the Federation of Progressive Women, the move “implies an attempt to control women’s bodies and, under the cover of the argument of protecting the conceived child, reducing or eliminating rights linked to abortion.”
Cristina Monge, a political science professor at Complutense University, went one step further and argued that the real danger was giving any rights to unborn children. “The moment you grant rights to a fetus, you are opening the door to the possible criminalization of abortion,” she said.
The left-wing Más Madrid party also weighed in, branding the law “a media spectacle for abortion-deniers.”
The PP insists that the benefit scheme has “nothing to do with abortion,” although the conservatives recognized that the controversy is part of a wider culture war that they are not afraid of fighting.
“A baby on the way is a blessing. Life, along with freedom, is the most precious thing that human beings can have,” explained Isabel Díaz Ayuso, the president of the PP in Madrid.
“Reminding them of this infuriates those who impose frivolous, unhinged, ideological agendas, who know deep inside that we are right and this stirs their conscience,” she added.
Indeed, when it comes to abortion, it seems the leftist central government of PM Pedro Sánchez is the one on a slippery slope.
After Sánchez made abortion significantly easier to access in a 2023 reform, he also imposed a new requirement on regional governments to maintain registers (“blacklists”) of doctors who refuse to perform them on conscience grounds—a move seen as the first step before taking away this right.
Ayuso’s PP government in Madrid was the only one to refuse to comply with the order.
