BARCELONA, Spain — A senior Spanish bishop has spoken out against a government campaign to promote abortion, saying the resources would be better spent helping women in difficult circumstances who wish to keep their baby.
The Secretary General of the Spanish Episcopal Conference, Francisco César García Magán, auxiliary bishop of Toledo, was critical of the Ministry of Health’s campaign which has the slogan “whatever you do will be alright.”
“I wish the slogan ‘whatever you do will be alright’ were true and also applied to women who want to continue their pregnancies and become mothers,” he said.
“I wish the same amount allocated to the pro-abortion campaign were given to a woman who chooses and decides to become a mother, even if she is in difficult circumstances and has that opportunity,” he added during a press conference on Thursday reporting on the meeting of the bishops’ standing committee.
García Magán also said it was difficult to understand a pro-abortion campaign at a time when Spain is suffering from a demographic winter.
“In a society that talks about the difficulty of population replacement, where one in four pregnancies ends in abortion, and where there is a law that allows it, I don’t understand the persistence of this situation,” he said.
“We defend the dignity of every person, and we reiterate: from conception until death,” the bishop added.
“It is a ‘yes’ to the child’s right to life, and a ‘yes’ to their right to health, education, and housing, until their final days,” he said, before noting that neither the family nor “the politician in power” should decide the moment of death.
The Spanish government launched the campaign last month, which includes the promotion of abortion via medication.
In a press release, the Ministry of Health said it would “begin the process of amending the product information leaflet for mifepristone, one of the medicines used in medical abortion, to allow its use outside the exclusively hospital setting.
“Furthermore, it will update the national health service’s portfolio of services to expressly include it within primary care,” it added.
Spain’s housing crisis
García Magán also weighed in the Maricarmen Abascal case that Pope Leo XIV commented on on his way back from France on Monday.
The case involved an 87-year-old woman being evicted from her home on a stretcher after her home was bought by a developer and the rent was increased.
After huge outcry and a protest encampment in Madrid, an agreement was eventually reached so that Abascal could return to her home and pay the same rent she had been for decades.
García Magán said that housing “is not a privilege, but a right” and said that “young people do not have decent access to housing, but their parents and grandparents did.”
The solution requires “demands vision from politicians” and “involves everyone in government.”
“There are many evictions in other autonomous communities, not in the one where Maricarmen’s case occurred,” he said.
However, he also said the housing crisis is not “a problem unique to Spain. In other European countries, the problem is as severe or even more so than in Spain; just look at Germany.”
He added that “it is not good to politicize this case.”
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