New Life has grown demanding on abortion. The magazine published this Thursday a piece signed by José Beltrán whose headline speaks of VOX’s light turn and reproaches Santiago Abascal for not committing to repeal the law. A few lines below, the same text contrasts the answers given by the leader of VOX with the “determination” of Alberto Núñez Feijóo, and the first proof it offers of that determination is that Feijóo guaranteed on Onda Cero, on 27 October, that he will keep the time-limit law. That is the yardstick: the demand to repeal applies in only one direction. And while the magazine wields it against VOX, abortion still occupies little space in the public conversation for reasons that have less to do with Abascal than with the bishops, whose own radio station hardly mentions it at all.
What Abascal said on Wednesday on Más de uno fits in a few lines. Rafa Latorre asked him several times whether he would keep the time limits, return to a grounds-based law or ban abortion, and Abascal replied that the most vulnerable are the elderly and the unborn, that he wants the defenceless to be allowed to be born, that the State should bet on life and on palliative care, and that he is aware his positions do not enjoy majority support. He did not say “repeal.” It is an answer that skirts the question, and it is legitimate to hold that against him. What cannot be sustained is holding it against him alone.
Because the contrast the magazine chooses is Feijóo, and Feijóo has not skirted anything. According to New Life itself, on 27 October he assured that women who have abortions will have the best health services. Days earlier, on SER, he had been more explicit: “I guarantee it in both the public and the private sector,” he said of abortion, and proposed that parents of girls under sixteen and seventeen be informed of the decision; not even that they consent, which was what the PP had in its 2023 programme. New Life presented that interview as a wink from Feijóo to the pro-life Catholic voter. The scale is therefore: whoever guarantees abortion in public and private healthcare winks an eye at the pro-life voter; whoever says he wants the unborn to be allowed to be born, without saying how, has made a light turn.
If abortion weighs so little in the public conversation, the explanation does not begin in a studio at Onda Cero. Among Catholics, no one has a louder megaphone to bring it into the conversation than the bishops, who control COPE through Ábside Media, and their radio station has left it out. Between 6 October, the day the Government approved urgent processing of the decree that obliges pregnant women to be informed of the methods and clinics for abortion, and 3 November, COPE broadcast about one hundred and sixty hours of football and twenty-five minutes on abortion, according to InfoVaticana’s count of the broadcast transcript. Twenty-two of those minutes were a repeat, at half-past three in the morning, of a September report. In daylight, one minute and fifteen seconds in four weeks. Carlos Herrera dispatched the decree in seventeen seconds. No Spanish bishop uttered the word abortion on their radio in all that time.
Time for abortion, the house knows how to find it when the issue serves another purpose. In January 2023, when VOX brought to the government of Castilla y León a package of measures to offer pregnant women the chance to hear the foetal heartbeat, a 4D ultrasound and psychological support, the bishops’ radio station spoke about abortion for days, and its main voice did so against VOX. Herrera concluded that “VOX’s target is PP voters, even if it means strengthening the socialists,” and asked the party to examine, not its moral principles, but the way it manages its condition as a junior coalition partner. The archbishop of Valladolid, Luis Argüello, used an interview on that same programme to remind the panellists live that abortion is not a right; the next day, Herrera went back to his own business. The bishops of the region took eight days to publish a note that essentially supported what the measure intended—that the pregnant woman should have information about the alternatives before deciding—and that called for addressing the issue “beyond ideological or partisan positions.” The measure, yes; the party, no.
The pattern is repeated in the Episcopal Conference. In April, asked directly about VOX and its proposal of national priority, the secretary general, César García Magán, explained that the Church does not move at the level of slogans, “neither this one nor any other.” Days later, the PP spokeswoman in Congress, Ester Muñoz, said at a press conference that abortion is not a problem for Spaniards and that no woman has difficulty accessing it. That, too, sounded like a slogan. It was not heard on the bishops’ radio.
When the president of the Conference, Luis Argüello, spoke about abortion in September, he placed it as the third “eviction” on a list, behind that of a pensioner and the Ceuta crisis. He added, it is true, that the solution can never be justified by a legal right that denies the child life. But for the three evictions he asked for the same remedy, “serene dialogue and agreements,” which is exactly what Feijóo offers: a debate on minors and the time limits untouched.
New Life misses the word “repeal” in Abascal. In Feijóo, who has said he will maintain the law, it has found determination. If the leader of VOX wants to regain the magazine’s favour, he already knows what he has to do: guarantee abortion in public and private healthcare, promise the parents of sixteen-year-old girls that they will be informed, and wait for the headline. It will be a wink.