The Constitutional Court will give absolute priority to the ruling on the abortion law

The Constitutional Court has set as one of its highest priorities to issue a ruling on the abortion law in the shortest possible time.

There is no specific date to bring this matter to the plenary session, but court sources indicate that it will be one of the first to be dealt with.

The reason why it has not been done in recent years is that the existing conservative majority until now was fully aware that the debate on their draft sentences was going to lead to a train crash, because the progressive minority was not going to accept them in any way, since it only considered it appropriate to endorse the current law of deadlines without hindrances or limitations.

At this time, the draft ruling on the abortion law —appealed by the PP in 2010— is in the hands of the magistrate of the conservative sector Enrique Arnaldo, who since last April has prepared a draft that has not been brought to plenary session. before the intention of the Government to approve a new law on the voluntary interruption of pregnancy.

Another reason why it has not been discussed is that the court that has just been renewed ended the mandate with its current composition last June.

In these circumstances, the former president of the Constitutional Court Pedro González-Trevijano decided to postpone the deliberation so that it could be taken over by the guarantee body once renewed.

The presentation prepared by Enrique Arnaldo endorses the law of terms, but contemplates a series of requirements and clauses to ensure that the woman makes the decision to abort or not after receiving more or less exhaustive information about the intervention to which she is going to undergo if you decide to go ahead.

The debate can be raised, therefore, in relation to the nature and specific content of this information, and the possibility that it becomes a form of pressure on the woman to guide her decision.

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According to court sources, it is not excluded, therefore, that the sentence on the abortion law still requires some procedures.

It is possible that the text prepared will not obtain the majority support of the court.

If such a thing happened, it may happen that the rapporteur has to be changed and that the matter passes into the hands of another magistrate, who would need more time to prepare his ruling project.

However, the rules of the court itself also admit the possibility that the person in charge of a sentence that has been left in a minority assumes the drafting of the majority sentence and in parallel presents his own particular vote against the ruling.

In any case, the will of the new progressive majority of the Constitutional Court is to decisively face the resolution of the appeal on the abortion law, aware that it is an absolute priority, due to its extraordinary relevance and because it would be unjustifiable for it to continue awaiting a ruling. when the ideal circumstances exist to leave it resolved.

Before Enrique Arnaldo's draft sentence, there were two others, carried out by two of his predecessors - Elisa Pérez Vera, a progressive, and Andrés Ollero, a conservative - over the 12 years that have elapsed since the approval of the abortion law.

The first endorsed the law of deadlines and was not carried out in full because the court had a conservative majority that was not going to approve it.

The second was also not the subject of deliberation because although there was still a conservative majority, the court considered that an intense social debate would be reopened that they wanted to favor us in a political scenario in which the issue of abortion had ceased to be a field of debate. confrontation between the PP and the PSOE.

Now, it will be necessary to see if the third draft of the sentence, the one that has been kept pending the renewal of the court, achieves consensus in the court, or a fourth project must be prepared.

In any case, with one text or another, the abortion sentence will have priority.

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