"In December 2020, my water bag broke. I had no more amniotic fluid and the vital prognosis (for the fetus) was very bad," Marta Vigara told AFP.

17 weeks pregnant, this 37-year-old geriatrician finds herself forced to carry out an urgent therapeutic abortion but comes up against a wall in the Madrid public hospital where she works, the Clinico San Carlos.

Geriatrician doctor Marta Vigara, who was unable to benefit from a therapeutic abortion at the hospital where she works, poses at her home in Madrid on February 10, 2022 OSCAR DEL POZO AFP

Her fellow gynecologists then told her that they could not perform voluntary termination of pregnancy (IVG) "as long as there was a fetal heartbeat" and referred her to private clinics.

"I arrived at the clinic bleeding, probably because of a placental abruption," she complains in her apartment in Madrid.

She will learn later, from the Order of Physicians, that all the practitioners of the gynecology department of this hospital, one of the largest in Spain, have been declared conscientious objectors against abortion since 2009.

A frequent situation in the public sector which has a "majority" of conscientious objector gynecologists-obstetricians, recognizes the College of Physicians, while there is no official register listing them.

This explains why 84.5% of abortions are carried out in the private sector, where they are covered by social security, according to official figures from 2020.

In some areas, women must therefore travel hundreds of kilometers to have an abortion due to the lack of public services and the absence of a specialized clinic nearby.

Eight of the 50 provinces of the country have not recorded any abortion since its decriminalization in 1985, denounces the left-wing government, which wants to legislate this year to guarantee a minimum of access to abortion in the public, one of the themes that will be at the center of the feminist demonstration on March 8.

Anti-abortion "Ambulance"

For ten years, the psychiatrist Jesus Poveda has regularly come with his team of "rescuers" in front of the Dator clinic in Madrid, one of the largest in the country for abortions, in order to dissuade women from having abortions.

Members of '40 dias por la vida' (40 days for life), an international anti-abortion organization that campaigns against abortion through prayer, with signs reading 'We pray for you and your baby' outside the clinic in private abortion Dator in Madrid on March 5, 2022 OSCAR DEL POZO AFP

“Interpelling directly” the patients, he offers them to get into his “ambulance”, a small van equipped with an ultrasound machine in order to “show them that it is a living being”, explains this professor at the Autonomous University of Madrid .

Demonstrations that a bill currently aims to penalize, by qualifying them as "harassment".

This text, of which the Socialists of Prime Minister Pedro Sanchez are at the origin, was adopted at the beginning of February in first reading by the Chamber of Deputies.

Nothing to discourage Dr. Poveda.

"We will continue to come", he assures, saying he is determined to "bypass the law" if it is definitively adopted.

Sign that the anti-abortion movements are very active, the Association of Catholic Propagandists (ACdP) deployed 260 panels in January in 33 cities, and in particular in the Madrid metro, with the slogan "Pray in front of a clinic that practices abortion is great.

Parental authorization for minors

Abortion was decriminalized in Spain in 1985 but for three reasons only: rape, "serious risk" for the woman and fetal malformation.

A van equipped with an ultrasound machine from '40 dias por la vida' (40 Days for Life), an international anti-abortion organization that campaigns against abortion through prayer, is parked outside the private abortion clinic Dator in Madrid on March 5, 2022 OSCAR DEL POZO AFP

It was not until 2010 that this country with a strong Catholic tradition legalized abortion without medical justification up to the 14th week of pregnancy.

In 2015, the right, then in power, wanted to return to the 1985 law. Finally, backpedaling in the face of outcry, in a country often at the forefront of feminism, it had nevertheless reformed the legislation to oblige minors 16 and 17 years old to provide parental consent.

An obligation - existing in most European countries with the exception of France, Germany and the United Kingdom - that the Spanish executive now wants to repeal.

The law allows "these young people (...) to freely decide to undergo an operation" of another type involving a vital risk, "but the consent of their parents is required" for abortion, said indignant at the end of February the Minister for Equality, Irene Montero.

For her part, Marta Vigara hopes that "things will change" because "when you are sent back" to an abortion clinic, "you feel stigmatized, as if you had done something wrong (...) I felt felt guilty and miserable".

© 2022 AFP