Feijóo reopens abortion debate in Spain and his party fears the cost

Feijóo reopens the abortion debate and the PP counts the price

Alberto Núñez Feijóo turned his interview on Cadena Ser into a debate on abortion, euthanasia and pensions. The response from part of the electorate that says it votes for him came quickly and none too kindly: he has just done the PSOE's campaign for it. The thesis, repeated ad nauseam in the back rooms of the Spanish right, is that the candidate has peine fronts that society considers closed and that appear on almost nobody's list of concerns. The nuance the PP itself puts on the table is another one: he is touching laws the PSOE left untouched, and doing so without needing VOX.

What Feijóo said about abortion in the Ser interview

The interview produced headlines of every kind. The candidate claimed to be a feminist with a phrase that circulates with a smirk —"How could I not be a feminist if there were many women in my house?"— and got tangled up in an exchange about the SMI (Spain's minimum wage) that ended with a "they're confirming to me that it is" while he was insisting it was not exempt. The clip serves as a sample: the economic terrain, which should be his home ground, was blurred against the custom-and-sarracena issues. And that is how the conversation reached abortion.

On that matter, the version attributed to the candidate is not to touch the deadline-based abortion law. What does get peine up is the flank of parental consent when the pregnant woman is a minor. There the nuance matters, and a lot: requiring permission is not the same as requiring notification.

What is the difference between notification and permission for minors' abortions?

Feijóo spoke of notification, not permission. The interviewer asked him expressly about that distinction and he stayed on notification, according to the account of the exchange that has circulated in recent days. The difference, in practice, separates informing the parents that their 16-year-old daughter is going to terminate the pregnancy from having to authorize it in writing.

The point of friction is whether a minor can undergo the procedure with her back turned to her family. Some consider it an outrage without nuance. Others point out that the law has worked this way for years and that reopening the issue has a political price. And a third, more pragmatic group argues that the real problem is not permission but the use of abortion as a method of contraception paid for with taxes.

The PP's tactic: touching what the PSOE did not touch

Some argue that the PP sank itself last legislative term by failing to repeal any law of the Zapatero era, and that it now tries to claim the credit before VOX does. Under that reading, parental consent would be the little sweetener offered to the partner so as not to enter into abortion itself. It is not a far-fetched interpretation: the edge is touched, not the core. The payoff, however, is collected in other parties' seats and the cost is paid in one's own.

The electoral cost nobody wants to calculate in writing

The most cited line of analysis is that the PP will not lose votes by leaving abortion alone but may lose them by opening it up. The example that gets repeated: centrist voters who would come to the PP or VOX over corruption and would defect to the PSOE over this issue alone. There is no public poll quantifying it, but the working intuition is that this flank exacts a high price.

Opposite is the contrary argument, and it has its own coherence. That the country is majority proge, noticeable at the playground, at the parents' association and in extracurricular activities, and that denying it does not change reality. On that thesis, opening the debate would not be a miscalculation but an amendment to a social majority that, it is claimed, supports abortion and votes for those who defend it. Two incompatible narratives about the same electorate.

Pensions, euthanasia and "sacrifices": the rest of the message

The most repeated diagnosis is not about abortion. It is that the candidate arrives at the campaign with the prime minister on the ropes, after dissolving the Cortes (Spain's parliament) and passing decrees through the back door, with PP and VOX together holding more than 200 seats until recently, and with thousands of rules and taxes crying out for review. And the message on offer is "sacrifice is needed", "we'll see what happens with pensions", abortion and euthanasia.

There lies the underlying problem: it is not the what, it is the order. The economy, immigration, insecurity and corruption remain the issues people put on the table; the rest are after-dinner debates. Whoever confuses the dinner table with the ballot box ends up fighting the very electorate they claimed to have.

The abortion figures circulating in the debate

The figures cited: more than 100,000 abortions a year and more than 300,000 births. From there comes the one-in-four proportion repeated as a headline, which should be handled with care because it mixes pregnancy terminations with live births.

The most uncomfortable argument is the double homicide one: the woman twelve weeks pregnant murdered on her way to the clinic, whose attacker would answer for two lives. Those who defend that reasoning use it as proof of the system's incoherence. And opposite, the least ideological proposal to have appeared is purely economic: a symbolic €20 co-payment for the first abortion, half the cost for the second and a share of it from the third on.

None of that is in the programme. But the campaign is already about this.

If the PP's calculation is that these issues mobilize at no cost, the ballot boxes will say so, not the headlines. What does not hold up is the claim that abortion matters to nobody: 100,000 terminations a year are a lot of conversations, almost all of them in low voices. And the way out is not by opening or closing a debate, but with natalist support measures, the only proposal nobody disputes.