María del Río, president of the Sí Podemos Canarias Parliamentary Group, assures that the new Abortion Law, by guaranteeing the closest public hospitals as reference centers for voluntary terminations of pregnancy (VTP), “will end the discrimination suffered on non-capital islands such as Lanzarote.”
Del Río, who last Friday denounced in the Health Commission of Parliament that VTPs are not performed in public hospitals on all the islands, with which “many women from our non-capital islands see their rights to equity and equal conditions in access to this right violated”, insists that the new legal text “will end this discrimination.”
María del Río shares the demands of the feminist movement of Lanzarote that have already spoken out with different texts and actions. “The transfer to another island for the voluntary termination of pregnancy, sometimes in solitude, entails obvious difficulties and sufferings for women that make the process much harder than it already is in itself,” says the regional deputy.
From the purple formation they assure that the Minister of Health, Blas Trujillo, explained in the aforementioned Health Commission that 9 of the 14 gynecologists of the Molina Orosa Hospital of Lanzarote “declared themselves conscientious objectors with respect to abortion”, which makes it impossible for voluntary terminations of pregnancy to be performed on the island. In addition, from Podemos they maintain that Trujillo pointed out that of the other five specialists “two are on leave, another took a reduction in working hours and one more is on leave, so that there is only one gynecologist available full time.”
“Respecting all rights, it cannot be that the right to conscientious objection is above the right of women to have abortions in the reference public hospitals, also on non-capital islands. Right for right,” said Del Río.
“This is one of the reasons why this new law seems so necessary to us, and hopefully it will be born with the necessary consensus to be strong and resist the tendencies to regress with which the extreme right threatens throughout the planet, starting with some states of the United States, European countries such as Poland, or the denialist position of VOX within our own borders,” insisted the regional deputy to the Minister of Health, Blas Trujillo.
The president of the Sí Podemos Canarias Parliamentary Group has stressed that, in health matters, the new legislation “guarantees the menstrual health of women who suffer disabling pain during their period and can have sick leave without affecting their salaries, recover the right to VTP for young people from 16 to 18 years old without the need for consent from parents/mothers, guardians.” “If they are mature enough to be mothers, they are also mature enough not to be,” adds María del Río, who emphasizes that they also need “free and access to the ‘morning-after pill’ in health centers.”
“We still have to achieve for the rest of the State what we already achieved at the initiative of Podemos in the Canary Islands in the previous legislature, reduce the VAT on feminine hygiene products,” she insisted.
To conclude, Del Río has defended that “the most important thing is to continue fighting not only to expand rights, but also to consolidate and maintain those already won”, since “something as important as being a mother can become a condemnation as a result of an error.”
