The Constitutional Court has upheld the appeal for amparo for a woman whom the Murcian Health Service referred to a private center in Madrid to abort. The First Room of the Constitutional Court, in a resolution for which the president, Cándido Conde-Pumpidohas unanimously concluded that her right to the termination of pregnancy, which is part of her fundamental right to physical and moral integrity, was violated.
The sentence against which the woman appealed initially considered that the decision of the Murcian Health Service was “justified” because no doctor in the Region of Murcia had requested to perform abortions. The TC, on the contrary, understands that this circumstance “cannot exempt the doctors of the Murcian public health or the centers linked to it from practicing the voluntary interruption of pregnancy in the legally provided cases”.
They explain that a decision such as the one adopted “would only have been possible if all these professionals had exercised their right to conscientious objection as established by law, which would have required them to exercise this right individually, in advance and in writing, which that in the prosecuted case was not accredited”.
The Court establishes that the legal provision that guarantees that the interruption of pregnancy must be carried out in the centers of the public health network “of the autonomous community itself”, except in exceptional cases in which the public health service cannot provide it due to a generalized conscientious objection, “constitutes a guarantee that the interruption of the pregnancy is carried out in accordance with constitutional requirements”.
It considers that this guarantee aims 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 this difficult situation in the least traumatic way possible.