The Spanish Senate has approved a more lenient abortion law. Spanish women will now be able to have an abortion in the first fourteen weeks of pregnancy, or up to the 22nd week in the event of medical complications.

Until the present time, abortion has only been possible in Spain in strictly defined cases, for instance after rape or in the event of serious foetal abnormalities.

The conservative opposition and the Roman Catholic church fiercely opposed the bill of the socialist government of Prime Minister José Zapatero. In October more than one million people demonstrated in Madrid against the new abortion law.