The Constitutional Court is expected to endorse the 2010 abortion law in its plenary session on Tuesday, after having rejected last February the first draft sentence, prepared then by magistrate Enrique Arnaldo, of the conservative sector. The new text has been drafted by the vice president of the court, Inmaculada Montalbán, who has stressed the gender perspective in the ruling, and abortion during the first 14 weeks of pregnancy as a woman's right.
The paper or draft resolution prepared by Arnaldo was rejected three months ago with the seven votes of the progressive sector, compared to 4 of the conservative bloc. The reason for the rejection was basically that the draft resolution considered the system of time limits constitutional, but proposed to annul article 17 of the law on voluntary interruption of pregnancy, considering that it did not contemplate the need to provide the pregnant woman with sufficiently exhaustive information. The rapporteur proposed that the woman who was going to have an abortion should be informed not only in documentary form, but also verbally about the intervention she was going to undergo and its possible alternatives.
The court rejected that this provision should be annulled, considering that its application had been sufficient to provide the pregnant woman who wanted to interrupt her pregnancy with the information she could specify about the step she was going to take. To annul the aforementioned article would have meant to make a mark of unconstitutionality to a relevant aspect of the regulation challenged by the PP. The progressive majority of the body of guarantees considered that the endorsement of the abortion law should be given without questioning any of its precepts, hence the first paper was rejected.
The new text, in turn, has been drafted after the entry into force of the new law on the voluntary interruption of pregnancy, approved by Parliament last February. This has allowed the judgment that puts an end to the questioning of the law of deadlines of 2010 also includes in some way the criteria with which that regulation has been updated, trying to match the doctrine of the Constitutional with the evolution of society.
This purpose, in fact, has influenced the recent postponements suffered by the decision to take the deliberation on the abortion law to the full court. The draft sentence of Judge Enrique Arnaldo was already drafted more than a year ago. The idea was to debate it after Easter 2022. But the body of guarantees decided to postpone the discussion so as not to generate new tensions in the court, which was barely a month away from concluding its mandate with the composition it had then.
At that time, the Constitutional Court had a conservative majority, which approved the sentences that annulled the state of alarm as a legal instrument to deal with the pandemic. That debate was already a great wear and tear for the court, which did not want to repeat the experience at the gates of its theoretical renewal, although finally the change did not come until January 2023. Pedro González-Trevijano and Juan Antonio Xiol, respectively president and vice president of the Constitutional until that date, agreed to the postponement pending renewal. His replacement last January gave way to a new phase of the Constitutional, already with a progressive majority, in which Cándido Conde-Pumpido and vice president Inmaculada Montalbán were elected, one of whose first decisions was to bring as soon as possible to the plenary the deliberation on the abortion law, on which now, four months later, After the aforementioned rejection of the first draft of the judgment, the court will definitively issue its judgment.