The regulation of abortion in Spain is, as is well known, in the process of being modified. There are many who are calling for a step forward and the expulsion of Organic Law 2/2010, of March 3, 2010, on sexual and reproductive health and the voluntary interruption of pregnancy, since it jeopardizes the freedom of conscience of physicians, undermines parental-filial relations and, most seriously, undermines the protection -nimal, moreover- that the Constitutional Court once afforded the unborn child.

The LO 2/2010 has established a combined system of time limits and assumptions for the voluntary termination of the life of the unborn -whom we jurists recognize by the term nasciturus (" the one who is going to be born"). According to article 14 of the Law, abortion is free during the first fourteen weeks of gestation. After this period, deadline, article 15 establishes a system of circumstances, agreement under which abortion is permitted up to 22 weeks in the case of "serious risk to the life or health of the pregnant woman" or "risk of serious anomalies in the fetus". Abortion is permitted at any time during pregnancy "when fetal anomalies incompatible with life are detected", or "when an extremely serious and incurable disease is detected in the fetus at the time of diagnosis" (art. 15.c). status In addition, any girl of sixteen and seventeen years of age can have an abortion without parental consent, and will not have to inform them as long as "she can justifiably allege that this will cause her a serious conflict", e.g., in view of the risk of "uprooting or abandonment" (art. 13). Finally, the exercise of conscientious objection is subject to the possibility of abortion not being undermined, and is only recognized for professionals "directly involved" in the abortion (art. 19.2).

This list of indeterminate concepts serves not so much to carry out the declared motive of guaranteeing "legal certainty"(see exhibition de Motivos de la Ley, No. 2), as to leave the path of abortion open and make it a somewhat easier way out. The unborn child has been, however, definitively hors la loi, stripped of its condition of person, of its status personae - even though this is logically deduced from article 16 of the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, which lapidly proclaims that "every human being has the right to recognition everywhere as a person before the law".

In 1985, the Constitutional Court established the jurisprudence currently in force in relation to abortion. At that time, a law that decriminalized feticide in certain cases, without admitting abortion at will, was being prosecuted. The Constitutional Court upheld the challenged law because it understood that the decriminalization cases adequately weighed the value of the life of the unborn and the rights of the mother. Although the Court avoided pronouncing on the ownership of the right to life by the unborn child, it recognized that it is "human life" (FJ 5), and that it embodies "a legal right constitutionally protected by article 15 of our Fundamental rule " (FJ 7). It admitted, however, that this life could be destroyed in certain cases -one of them, by the way, very loosely defined. However, no reading of STC 53/1985 admits ending the life of the unborn freely, neither in the fourteenth, nor in the twelfth, nor in the first six weeks of pregnancy. This is as much as to deprive it definitively of value and convert it into "life without vital value" (lebensunwertes Leben), a concept that awakens, I suppose, dark reminiscences.