Marching Against Abortion, But Only When The Left Are In Power

As my post on the Gürtel case is still very much a work in progress let's turn our attention to last weekend's demonstration against the Spanish government's proposed abortion law reform. It's extremely bad manners to organise such a major demonstration of Madrid's permanently angry right when I'm still on holiday but we'll let that pass. Were you there? If we believe the reports in the right wing press, it would be easy to get the impression that almost the whole Spanish population turned out for the event. A tidal wave of decent Spaniards marching united against Zapatero the baby killer.

Well not quite. Despite the now habitual claims by the organisers, the sympathetic press and the Comunidad de Madrid of a million or two attending, it seems that the true number fell well short of 100,000. Apart from those who habitually attend these events to estimate numbers, there is a new kid on the block. A company called Lynce claims that it has software which can count the number of people occupying a given space from aerial photos. Such a method would obviously be open to question in a genuine march which starts at one point and ends at another as you have to take into account the movement of the participants. Fortunately, that's not the case for the demonstrations organised by the Partido Popular and allies; they are generally static affairs concentrating crowds in a prominent Madrid street for the benefit of the Telemadrid helicopter. The PP doesn't walk.

Since we're on the subject of Telemadrid it's worth noting that the channel did its very best to encourage participation in the demonstration, virtually the only thing lacking was a direct instruction from the Lideresa herself for viewers to desert their sofas and take to the streets.



Santa Esperanza was of course there, and was joined by Jaime Mayor Oreja and none other than the Moustachioed Crusader, Jose Maria Aznar. The latter was accorded superstar treatment by many of the nostalgics who so fondly remember his time in office. Oddly, for a demonstration against abortion, none of them appeared to remember that during Aznar's time in office it's estimated that approximately 500,000 abortions took place in Spain. We can't be on the streets all the time was the excuse offered for this memory lapse by one of the organisers, who appeared to have forgotten that he occupied a position in the same government. PP leader Mariano Rajoy simply forgot to go, although he claims that he didn't want to politicise the event! The PP has now said it will introduce it's own reform when it returns to office, although the party refuses to spell out even a single detail of what that reform will involve. The signs from the turnout, habitual exaggerations apart, are that abortion doesn't even get the full PP hardcore support onto the streets, never mind the less rabid voters they need to attract if they are to stand a chance of winning an election.

If we needed a reminder of why the abortion reform is necessary it came a few days ago. In my first post on this subject I mentioned the case of a fishing exercise carried out by members of the Guardia Civil eager to find evidence of illegal activity at a Madrid abortion clinic called Isadora. This included doorstepping women who had been to the clinic and subsequently the judicial decision to allow an extremist anti-abortion organisation to involve itself in the case. The case has finally been stopped, because not a single indication of illegal activity had been found. Despite the absolute lack of evidence, a handful of police officers and a sympathetic judge have been allowed to intimidate women who had taken the (never easy) decision to have an abortion under the existing legislation.