The right to life has been one of the main arguments of the Popular Party and Vox to question rights such as abortion or euthanasia in court. A universal vision of that right that, according to the right, prevents any type of individual autonomy over the decision to terminate a pregnancy or end one’s life in cases of extreme suffering. But the latest decisions of the Constitutional Court, which has rejected their appeals to the laws that enshrine both rights, have questioned this line of action that they have been carrying out for two decades on the streets, in Parliament and in the courts.
The Constitutional rejects Vox’s appeal and endorses the euthanasia law
Further
The right to life is included in article 15 of the Spanish Constitution. “Everyone has the right to life,” says the Magna Carta. And it is an article that both PP and Vox have placed as a key to their most important resources. The right to abortion, said Alberto Núñez-Feijóo’s party in its appeal, is “incompatible” with the right to life of an unborn child. The right to euthanasia, Vox said in its appeal, clashed with a right to life “of an absolute nature.”
The Constitutional ruling that endorses the euthanasia law and rejects the ultra-right’s appeal directly contradicts these arguments. And it denies the largest in its initial section: the right to life is key in the Constitution, but it is not the only one. Both progressive and conservative magistrates remind Santiago Abascal’s party that the same article 15 that defines the right to life, immediately after, contains more words: “Everyone has the right to life and to physical and moral integrity.” And even more rights: dignity and the free development of personality.
This more complete version of the right to life is habitually omitted by the right in their resources and slogans. Opposition to abortion calls itself “pro-life,” for example. “Without a doubt, what our Constitution consecrates is the right to life,” the PP’s vice president of social policies, Carmen Navarro, said on TVE in February. “There is a very clear collision of the euthanasia law with the fundamental right to life,” said Santiago Abascal at the doors of the Constitutional Court.
The Constitutional ruling on euthanasia contradicts that argument and explains that the right to life is not an absolute right, and that this is also nothing new. The same court already said it, for example, when in 1985 it endorsed several assumptions to abort as compatible with that right to life, he recalls. The right to life, the magistrates explain, “must be read in connection with these other constitutional precepts”, alluding to integrity, dignity and free development. This prevents, they add, that the protection of the right to life becomes an attack on the “space of freedom and autonomy of the subject, and the imposition of an existence alien to the person and opposed to the free development of his personality lacking constitutional justification. ”.
Neither the Constitution nor the European Convention on Human Rights advocates that version of the right to life that the right wing in Spain wields. “It does not require absolute protection of human life that could oppose the free and conscious will of its owner,” says this sentence of more than a hundred pages. Putting an end to one’s life in the cases contemplated by law, of irreversible and unbearable suffering and illness, is for the Constitutional “one of the vital decisions protected by the right of self-determination of the person that derives from the fundamental rights to physical and moral integrity in connection with the recognition of the principles of dignity and free development of personality”.
In its appeal, Vox mentioned these rights, but not in the same sense. “What is and must be dignified or free is life itself and there is no room for a dignity or freedom whose preservation requires the disappearance of life,” said the far-right party. Arguments that are shared by the two conservative magistrates who have voted against. Enrique Arnaldo, for example, explains that recognizing this right entails an “inevitable consequence of devaluing the Constitution.” Concepción Espejel concedes that euthanasia is “an exception to the state duty to protect life.”
life and abortion
The opposition of abortion or euthanasia to life is not new, neither in the courts, nor in the pulpits, nor in the street. In 2009 it was Mariano Rajoy, then leader of the PP and the opposition, who encouraged joining the “For life” demonstration that toured Madrid in March of that year in protest against the abortion law of the socialist Executive of José Luis Rodríguez Shoemaker. That day, the doctor Gádor Joya read a manifesto as spokesperson for the “Right to Live” platform, in which she called for laws that “protect the right to live.” A few days ago he left his seat for Vox in the Assembly of Madrid.
The Constitutional ruling that, except for surprise or last-minute change, will reject the appeal of the PP filed almost 13 years ago against that abortion law that it promised to repeal and barely modified when it had an absolute majority, is still not known. But even the presentation by the conservative Enrique Arnaldo, rejected by the progressive majority of the plenary to seek a broader endorsement of the norm, rejected those absolutist postulates on the right to life, in this case the life of the unborn.
“The legal right that is prenatal life is protected in a reasonably sufficient way through preventive measures, active social policies to support maternity and the pregnant women to whom it refers, and a neutral counseling procedure for the woman”, acknowledged that first draft. That same text also invited to analyze the freedom, dignity and free development as well as the physical and moral integrity of women when making this decision.
Not even the conservative reports on the right to abortion and its compatibility with the right to life, therefore, endorse the postulates of the right on the total primacy of this right, for so many years brandished in demonstrations and political speeches. The leader of the PP, Alberto Núñez Feijóo, chose to slightly soften his speech after the setback of the Constitutional, limiting himself to stating the obvious that abortion is not a right included in the European Convention on Human Rights. An implicit respect for the decision of the guarantee court that cost him an attack from Bishop José Ignacio Munilla: “The PP’s betrayal of the cause of life is total and absolute.”