The right to abortion has been a long and thorny battle in Portugal. After 50 years of democracy, it is still one of the countries in the European Union with one of the most restrictive laws for women, since it only contemplates the voluntary interruption of pregnancy in the first 10 weeks of gestation. This fact is pushing many pregnant women to resort to clinics in Spain, where the allowed period is 14 weeks, which can be extended to 22 if the physical or mental health of the pregnant woman is at risk or the fetus suffers from serious anomalies.
According to information from the weekly Express, More than half a thousand Portuguese women went to have an abortion at two Spanish centers during 2023 because they had exceeded the ten weeks established as a limit by Portuguese legislation. However, it was not the year with the most demand. Only one clinic in Badajoz performed more than 500 in 2019 (439 in 2023), while another private center in Vigo performed 125 in 2022, during the pandemic.
To combat this restrictive rule, the Socialist Party presented a bill in the Assembly of the Republic in September to extend the deadline to 12 weeks, although it will be difficult for it to succeed taking into account the overwhelming majority of deputies from right-wing forces in the chamber (138 compared to 92 for leftist formations). Since spring, the Portuguese Government has been in the hands of the conservative Democratic Alliance coalition. The socialists did not take advantage of the eight years of Prime Minister António Costa’s mandate (2015-2023) to carry out the reform.
“Our initiative now arises from the failures that have been identified that show the difficulties in access to voluntary interruption of pregnancy in the National Health System, which have been evidenced in reports and which force hundreds of women to travel to Spain, thus accentuating socioeconomic discrimination,” explains the president of the socialist parliamentary group, Alexandra Leitão, to EL PAÍS.
The main problems detected, adds Leitão, are the high number of objecting doctors and the territorial inequality in performing a pregnancy termination. The socialist proposal proposes eliminating the current imposition of three mandatory days of reflection on women and the requirement that abortion be authorized by two doctors.
The Left Bloc, which only has five deputies, has also presented another proposal for the deadline law to be extended to 14 weeks, similar to what happens in Spain. Neither of the two Iberian countries, which have had strong Catholic roots and long-lasting dictatorships that lasted until the seventies, expedited the approval of laws that enshrined women’s right to decide. In both cases, regulations were approved allowing abortion in three cases (rape, fetal malformation or risk to the woman’s health), but it was not until the 21st century that a law with deadlines similar to that in force in France, Sweden and the Netherlands.
Spain did so in 2010, three years later than Portugal, which put it to a referendum in 2007, where 59% voted in favor of the law. It was the second attempt to establish the right to free abortion after the one carried out in 1998. On that occasion, despite the fact that the norm was approved in the Assembly of the Republic, the socialist Prime Minister António Guterres, current Secretary General of the UN , betrayed his own party’s vote and allied with the leader of the center-right opposition and current president of the Republic, Marcelo Rebelo de Sousa, to call a referendum. Guterres and Rebelo, very friends and very Catholics, defended the no. And they won by about 50,000 votes. The final decriminalization would come during another socialist cabinet, that of Prime Minister José Sócrates. Since he has been at the head of the UN, Guterres has admitted that his position has changed and he has been in favor of decriminalization.
But it is not a settled issue in Portugal. If on the left side the aim is to reopen the debate to increase the period for women to freely decide, on the right side there are voices that defend a new referendum to try to reverse the law in force. Paulo Nuncio, president of the parliamentary group of the conservative Social Democratic Center (CDS), the minority party that belongs to the governing coalition, is in favor of a new referendum and also of restricting access to abortion with the application of fees, as has already happened during other legislatures with a majority on the right. However, the prime minister and president of the Social Democratic Party (PSD, center-right), Luís Montenegro, has indicated that this is a “resolved issue.”
Abortion has been a divisive issue that rulers prefer not to remove like Luís Montenegro, but neither did António Costa before. The truth is that, despite having a deadline law, it is not easy for Portuguese women to have an abortion in their country. Or at least it is not the same depending on the place of residence. 33% of hospitals do not carry out voluntary terminations of pregnancy, according to the study published in 2023 by the Health Regulatory Entity.
In 2022, 15,616 voluntary abortions were performed in the country, 15% more than the previous year. The majority was carried out in public health. The study also made it possible to detect the cases of 1,366 women who made the consultation in 2022 and could not terminate their pregnancy because they had exceeded ten weeks of gestation. Some of them sought the solution in Spanish clinics.
