Comments fixed - y precauciones de España

A friend confirmed (thanks!) that there was a problem with posting comments here. I did some digging, and I think I found the problem. You should be able to post comments now.

He also pointed me to a New York Times report about a clash between a Catholic educator and the Spanish Prime Minister.

One day last month, Sister María Victoria Vindel gave her 15-year-old students a shockingly graphic lecture on reproductive health: PowerPoint slides of dismembered and disfigured fetuses interspersed with biblical quotations and pictures of a grinning José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero, Spain's prime minister.

"They laugh while many innocent children will die," one of the captions read. The presentation ended with the message, "No to abortion, yes to life!...."

The school, where Sister Vindel is headmistress, refused to comment on the slide show, which appeared to be downloaded from the Internet. The regional government, run by the opposition Popular Party, sent inspectors to the school, a Catholic institution that is financed partly by the state and partly by the parents. The government called the presentation "inappropriate" and said that it could constitute "moral aggression...."

Another important nugget in the story is the illustration of how the "health of the mother" exception to laws restricting abortions is used as a wide open door to obtaining abortions in Spain.

Abortion is technically a crime in Spain, though a law introduced in 1985, 10 years after Franco's death, permits abortions under certain circumstances. In practice, however, abortions are widely available because doctors cite a mental health exception.

The current law allows terminations in the first 12 weeks of pregnancy only in cases of rape and in the first 22 weeks in cases of congenital disorder. However, a woman can abort at any time if her mental or physical health is at risk — an exception cited in about 97 percent of abortions in Spain, according to Empar Pineda, spokeswoman for the Spanish Association of Accredited Abortion Clinics.

This is why abortion rights supporters in the US fight so hard for these health-of-the-mother exceptions. "Health" can be so vaguely defined that the resulting loophole is so large as to render abortion restriction laws ineffective.

The Night Writer has more about this and the direction to which Spain is headed generally.