Emotions run high for Portugal vote

Emotions run high for Portugal vote
By Elaine Sciolino
Copyright by The International Herald Tribune
Published: February 9, 2007


LISBON: Last week, hundreds of children from two Catholic day care centers in the port city of Setúbal arrived home with a most unusual note from school: a fictional letter from a fetus to the woman who conceived and aborted it.

"Mommy, how were you able to kill me?" the letter read. "How were you able to allow me to be cut up in pieces and thrown into a bucket?"

But the Reverend Miguel Alves, its author and the centers' director, defended his action as perfectly "normal," adding, "There's no reason for indignation."

The letter reflects one view in a passionate, often raw campaign by supporters and opponents of abortion to sway voters before a referendum this Sunday on whether Portugal should decriminalize abortion.

But the incident of the letter infuriated abortion supporters and some of the children's parents, and even made some opponents uneasy.

"It was completely incorrect, low class," said Manuel de Lemos, the director of a confederation of charitable organizations, who opposes a liberalization of the law. "But Portugal is a 90 percent Catholic country, and that means that 90 percent of the voters should vote no. Being Catholic is a way of life."

Cardinal José da Cruz Policarpo, the Patriarch of Lisbon, has told Catholics to uphold the "sanctity of life" and oppose any change to Portuguese law. He also argued that the balance of Europe's race and culture is at risk as a result of low birth rates.

With one of the most restrictive abortion laws in the European Union, Portugal is also the only member that has put on trial women who undergo illegal abortions, the health care providers who perform them and even "accomplices" like husbands or family members.

The referendum, if approved, would be the first step toward both legalizing abortions in the first 10 weeks of pregnancy and allowing women to openly seek medical help from the social security system. If it is approved, it is expected to be passed quickly into law by Parliament, the majority of whose members support the changes.

But in this overwhelmingly Catholic country, the referendum has pitted the Socialist government against the Catholic Church and exposed divisions within the church hierarchy itself.

It has recalled the botched backstreet abortions that ended in death and the humiliation of women who have been forced to go to trial. It has divided families and sparked a debate on how "modern" a nation Portugal is more than three decades after the end of dictatorship.

"This is an important moment for Portugal because it's a chance to shed the image that we are in the Middle Ages," said Maria de Belém Roséira, a Socialist deputy, head of Parliament's health committee and a former health minister. "That a woman who ends an unwanted pregnancy can be sent to prison is unacceptable and hypocritical."

Women who have gone to trial for undergoing abortions have been punished not with prison but with suspended sentences and a fine; health care professionals who have carried out abortions have been punished more severely.

In one highly publicized trial that ended in 2002, a hospital nurse spent four years in prison for conducting illegal abortions on the side before her eight-year sentence was commuted.

The criminal aspect of abortion is widely seen as unfair to women, even by much of the church hierarchy and supporters of the no vote.

"This practice is so stupid, so inhumane," said Marcelo Rebelo de Sousa, a leading political commentator who opposes approval of the referendum. "This is very Portuguese — you have the law and you have the social reality."

The validity of the referendum hinges on whether more than 50 percent of the country's more than eight million voters cast their ballots. A similar referendum in 1998 took place on a sunny Sunday in June, when many Portuguese went to the beach. Only 32 percent of the electorate turned up at the polls, voting by a razor-thin margin to retain the existing law. The result was declared invalid.

Last autumn, polls showed more than 70 percent of voters supported a change in the law this time, although recent surveys indicate a drop in support to slightly lower than 60 percent in recent weeks. About 40 percent of the voters have said in several polls that they are either undecided or will not vote.

The campaign has played out on the streets, on the Web, in churches, health clinics and the corridors of power.

On Thursday, two dozen Socialist members of Parliament carried green and white flags with the word "Sim" — or "Yes" — through one of Lisbon's main squares. At a headquarters for youth for the no vote a few blocks away, young people sold T-shirts and plastic fetuses made in China.

Prime Minister José Sócrates, a Socialist whose center-left government enjoys a comfortable majority in Parliament, has campaigned hard in favor of the referendum, calling the country's tens of thousands of illegal abortions every year "Portugal's most shameful wound" and urging voters to go to the polls.

After his election in a landslide nearly two years ago on a platform of reform modernization, Sócrates called for an abortion law "that is more modern and more European."

The referendum also has triggered the memories of women who had illegal abortions many years ago.

"There is still a stigma," said a 46- year-old educator who said she was only now able to talk to her friends about the abortion she had 18 years ago.

The practice of abortion in Portugal is among the most restrictive in the 27- country European Union. Only a few countries, including Malta (where all abortion is illegal), Ireland and Poland have tougher legislation.

Despite a legal morning-after pill and contraception use by 80 percent of women of fertility age, Portugal has the second highest pregnancy rate among teenagers in Europe, second only to Britain.

The current law in Portugal, passed in 1984, allows abortion until the 12th week of pregnancy in case of "mental and physical risk," until 16 weeks in case of rape, until 24 weeks in case of a malformed fetus and at any time if the woman's life is in danger. It imposes prison sentences of up to three years for all other women who obtain an abortion and up to eight years for a medical professional who provides one.

But the availability of abortion is complicated by the narrow interpretation the medical profession has given to the existing law. Portugal's conservative psychiatric hierarchy has ruled that an unwanted pregnancy is a mental health issue only in extreme cases; most medical doctors are unwilling to challenge the conventional wisdom.

In Spain, by contrast, where the law is similar, the law is liberally interpreted and abortions routinely performed. That has created a lucrative market for legal abortions in Spain for those Portuguese women who can afford it.

Portuguese newspapers carry advertisements every day of clinics over the border in Spain offering "voluntary treatment of pregnancy" or even "voluntary interruption of pregnancy."

Even if the law is changed along the lines of the referendum to allow abortion on demand in the first 10 weeks of pregnancy, it will still be stricter than the 12- week limit in Germany, France and Italy.

Even within the clergy itself, there are divisions. On Thursday, a 79-year- old priest, Reverand Manuel Costa Pinto, from the small town of Lamego, stunned the church hierarchy in declaring that he planned to vote "yes."

"I will vote 'yes' without any difficulty," he told the Portuguese news agency Lusa. "I don't take it lightly. I know my responsibility as a Catholic and as a priest."

Calling the current law "real infanticide," he described the crisis of women who are too poor and too afraid to have an illegal abortion, and even less to go have it done abroad. "They put their babies into a bag and throw them into the garbage, in the gutters" or "abandon them in the middle of the fields" after giving birth, he said.

The referendum will ask: "Do you agree with the decriminalization of a woman's choice to voluntarily interrupt pregnancy in the first 10 weeks, in a legally authorized health establishment?"

"There has always been a double standard in Portugal toward abortion and that's what we want to eliminate," said Duarte Vilar, the executive director of the Family Planning Association. "The majority of the Portuguese people are Catholic but in a very autonomous way. Even if we are Catholic, we are a soft Catholic country."