Professor says Spain's new law will not reduce abortions

Madrid, Spain, Feb 19, 2010 / 17:07 pm

The head of the Genetics department at the University of Alcala in Spain, Nicolas Jouve de la Barreda, warned this week that the government’s new law on abortion goes against medical ethics and will not reduce the number of abortions.

“Nobody believes this legislative reform will help reduce the number of abortions,” the professor told the organization, Professionals for Ethics.

“The promotion of contraceptive methods, the morning-after pill and abortion itself cannot result in the reduction of abortions but rather the opposite. The experience of other countries proves it,” he continued.

The professor noted that the law has an “ideological undercurrent” that seeks to impose pro-abortion beliefs on children through education and on college campuses by requiring medical schools to teach abortion methods.

He said medical students are taught how to carry out “a uterine evacuation, generally known as a “D & C.”  However, “the intention is not to teach these techniques as all gynecologists learn them at the university, but rather to teach techniques designed to kill a fetus,” something which conflicts “directly with medical ethics.”

Jouve de la Barreda said the new law also goes against science, which has demonstrated that life begins at the moment of conception.  Therefore “when an embryo is destroyed or a fetus is crushed in order to carry out an abortion, what is destroyed or crushed is the life of a human being in its first stages of development.”

After defending the right to conscientious objection, the professor called on the scientific and university community to act consistently “with the truth and to always defend it, without bending to ideologies or impositions that are contrary to scientific knowledge and professional ethics.”