In May of last year, the Christian Lawyers foundation went to the administrative courts to try to force the Barcelona City Council to withdraw a leaflet that aimed to inform young people about how to have an abortion. The ultra-Catholic platform argued that the brochure “maliciously omitted the side effects and sequelae” that a voluntary termination of pregnancy can cause. The Barcelona Court of Appeal has decided to dismiss, as a court did in the first instance, their request and to order them to pay the legal costs after considering that the document is only informative and that Christian Lawyers have no legitimacy to interfere in the communication between the City Council and the Generalitat’s Department of Health, which was also sued.
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The leaflet is still available online. It is a mere informative exercise that reminds that all women can decide, because it is a right, to terminate a gestation process free of charge in a public health center (if they are minors, the guardian’s authorization is required), informs about the maximum deadlines to do so, the abortion process, and the channels where to seek information.
Additionally, the leaflet offers a couple of statements about the right to do so: “Aborting is very safe and does not affect your fertility. Only you have the right to decide about your body and the termination of pregnancy.” That phrase was one of the arguments used to force the withdrawal of the information by Christian Lawyers, one of the most active conservative platforms in the pro-life movement in Spain. The association was the instigator of the judicial halt of euthanasia for Noelia Castillo, the 25-year-old paraplegic woman who had to wait 601 days to see her will to receive help to die fulfilled.
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Polonia Castellanos, the president of the association, was the one who signed the dismissed lawsuit. Section 3 of the Contentious Chamber of the Superior Court of Justice of Catalonia (TSJC) considers that the reported document merely includes “the legally required requirements and the procedure to follow in cases of abortion.” Christian Lawyers argued they were legitimized to request the withdrawal of the leaflet thanks to their statutes, since among their objectives are the right to life and health protection. That self-attribution had already been rejected by the State Attorney as legitimizing to appeal, a blockage also assumed by the Barcelona Court of Appeal ruling: “Any association that includes among its purposes a similar objective could have legitimacy to challenge what it considers contrary to the law […], which would imply the recognition of a kind of universal popular action unknown in our legal system,” it defends using a 2020 Supreme Court ruling. The issue was that the leaflet caused them harm.
