MADRID (LifeSiteNews) — Spain has demanded registries of doctors who refuse to commit abortions, prompting pro-life professionals to denounce the move as an attempt to create as a “blacklist.”
Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez recently wrote to regional presidents of areas governed by conservatives “urging them to launch a registry of conscientious objectors to abortion,” OSV News reported.
The push follows a regulation requiring all of Spain’s public hospitals to commit abortions and seeks to facilitate access to abortion in areas where it is difficult to find doctors willing to commit the baby-killing procedure.
For example, in La Rioja, long governed by conservatives, most of the doctors in public hospitals have refused to commit abortions due to conscientious objections. “The problem we had was that all health care staff previously objected to abortions, including in private clinics,” Izaskun Fernández Núñez, the president of the group Progressive Women of La Rioja, told Euronews in 2023.
In Castile and León, five out of nine provinces “hadn’t reported a single abortion since 2010” at the time of the 2023 report.
“Women can’t do it in their province even if they paid, even if they went private … not even that option exists,” Nina Infante Castrillo, the vice president of the Feminist Forum of Castile and León, said.
These difficulties have led to government-mandated registry requirements that conscientious objectors are logged in all autonomous communities, with a deadline of three months.
If lists of conscientious objectors are not produced during that time span, “the appropriate legal mechanisms will be activated to enforce their compliance,” Sánchez threatened. “Respecting the conscience of medical professionals must never be an obstacle to women’s healthcare,” he argued.
Professional advocates of conscientious objection called out the registry mandate as unconstitutional and a “blacklist.”
“No matter what the prime minister says, the right to object is a constitutional right. Who can order private citizens to register in a registry that not even the Constitutional Court requires as a condition? From that point on, everything is just gimmicks and tricks,” José Antonio Díez, general coordinator of the National Association for the Defense of the Right to Conscientious Objection, or ANDOC, told Alpha y Omega Catholic media.
“Why don’t they create a list of doctors who want to perform abortions and euthanasia, which would be the most practical option? These registers of objectors they want to create are blacklists to professionally exclude doctors who want to exercise their right to conscientious objection,” said Eva Martín, president of ANDOC, as cited by Alpha y Omega.
Abortion rates are reportedly rising again in Spain to near their all-time high in 2011. A total of 103,097 abortions were committed there in 2023, a 4.8 percent increase from 2022, and an 8.7 percent increase from 2014, according to Health Ministry data.
Abortion has been legal in Spain with various restrictions since 1985, and the abortion rate more than doubled from 54,000 in 1998 to 112,000 in 2007. In 2010, socialist José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero’s government further loosened abortion restrictions to allow the lethal practice through the 14th week of pregnancy, with legal extensions until 22 weeks under the conditions of supposed risk to the mother’s health or signs of “serious disabilities” of the unborn baby.
