Madrid (EFE) that this practice is common.
This decision has been made as a result of a complaint by a woman who in 2014 was referred by the Murcian health system to a private health center in Madrid for the termination of her pregnancy.
Murcia is one of the twelve provinces that did not notify any voluntary interruption of pregnancy in 2021, the same ones that have officially not performed a single abortion for six years, according to the latest report from the Ministry of Health.
These are Jaén (Andalucía), Huesca, Teruel and Cuenca (Aragón), Toledo and Guadalajara (Castilla-La Mancha), Palencia, Ávila, Segovia, Soria and Zamora (Castilla y León) and Cáceres (Extremadura), as well as in the autonomous cities of Ceuta and Melilla.
However, the Health data show that women residing in these regions did undergo voluntary terminations of pregnancy in 2021, which means that to do so they had to travel to other provinces or autonomous communities.
Specifically, almost 5% of the women who underwent a voluntary termination of pregnancy in Spain in 2021 resided in provinces that that same year did not report a single abortion.
The most paradigmatic case is that of Castilla-La Mancha, where 58% of the residents who underwent an abortion did not receive such medical attention in their province of residence. In fact, despite the fact that Toledo was the Castilian-La Mancha province where the most residents had abortions, it did not practice voluntary interruptions of pregnancy in 2021.
In turn, in Aragón, Castilla y León and Extremadura, this percentage ranges between 22 and 32%.
Aborting in a region, a fundamental right
Legal sources report that the First Chamber of the TC has unanimously granted protection to a woman for appreciating that the Murcian Health Service, by referring the plaintiff to a private health center in Madrid in 2014, has violated the right of legal configuration of women to the interruption of pregnancy, which is part of their fundamental right to physical and moral integrity.
A first sentence of the autonomous court considered this decision of the Murcian Health Service justified because, according to its defense, no physician in the Region of Murcia had requested to perform abortions.
But the 2010 abortion law does not establish that health workers had to report that they were willing to perform interruptions, but rather that those who wanted to exercise their right to conscientious objection had to report this in advance and in writing, something that the Constitution has taken into account for his ruling.
With this decision, the TC tries to safeguard “that the woman who is going to terminate the pregnancy, who is in a situation of physical and emotional vulnerability, does not leave her usual environment and can count on the support of her relatives to face to this difficult situation in the least traumatic way possible”.
Most abortions are performed in private clinics.
84% of the 90,189 abortions performed in Spain in 2021 were performed in hospitals or private clinics, despite the fact that 71% of the information was requested in public centers.
Catalonia, the Balearic Islands and Cantabria are the communities where the most abortions are assumed by public health (52.5%, 61.8% and 67.3%, respectively). At the opposite point are Andalusia, Aragon, Castilla-La Mancha, Extremadura and Murcia, where the percentage of public abortions is between 0 and 0.5%.
However, the abortion reform approved last February contemplates that women are guaranteed the possibility of abortion in public health and as close as possible to their home.
One of the measures that the regulation includes to achieve this end is the creation of a registry of conscientious objector doctors in each autonomous community to make it easier for public health centers to organize themselves and guarantee the presence of sufficient personnel to perform abortions, avoiding trips to other territories and referrals to private clinics.