The day before the protests I attended a Comisiones Obreras trade union assembly (Workers' Commissions). The hall was filled with about 200 women and was brimming with anger. In one of the opening speeches tribute was paid to a woman called Concha Carretero who died on January 1st this year at the age of 95. Carretero’s story, as I grasped it in my broken Spanish, reminds me of the potency behind the word often used at Spanish protests – indignada - and placed the indignation and exasperation now focused on the new law into context.
Carretero, born in 1918, was first
imprisoned when General Francisco Franco’s army entered Madrid in 1939. Arrested after attending
a meeting of the Juventudes Socialistas Unificadas (United Socialist Youth) she was taken to a police cell where she was beaten and electrocuted and made to clean up
the blood of her fellow captives. Lying unconscious after a beating on the
night of August 4th 1939, her cellmates - thirteen women - were taken and
executed by firing squad. Almost a year later, Carretero was released only to
be quickly re-arrested. This time she avoided freezing to death when stripped
naked and doused in buckets of cold water by exercising all night in her cell.
By then Carretero’s father, an anarchist, had been found dead on the street,
and her mother, who had suffered a serious injury when a lift fell on top of
her while cleaning in the dark shaft, slept unbeknownst to her daughter under
the archways of the prison where she was held. Not long after her release
Carretero’s husband and father of her first child was arrested and shot by
firing squad. Carretero’s crime had been her involvement and work with the
Republican army, making clothes and minding the children of men and women on
the front during the Civil War. But more than that it had been to dare
to challenge the might and divine authority of fascist Spain. Going on to re-marry
and have five more children, Carretero attended the Almudena Cemetery in Madrid
every year to mark the anniversary of the execution of her thirteen cell mates,
the Thirteen Roses, and every year she called for the 'Third Republic'.
The thread of Carretero’s life running from
1918 to 2014 ties Saturday’s protests into a bitter continuum and links today’s
abortion debates to unfinished battles. Listening to the language used by
Spanish politicians is to acknowledge that the Civil War and the Dictatorship
are not distant memories here. The constant references to ‘democracy’ and ‘rule
of law’ at press conferences and parliamentary debates ring more like subtle
threats and hints at their alternatives than statements of fact. But with the abortion rights law introduced by the Socialist party in 2010, many felt that whatever else, at least women were freed from religious constraints when it came to controlling their own bodies. Overturning this law, more than any other controversial legislation during the crisis, will almost certainly send the vast numbers disaffected
voters rushing to the polls to get rid of the government next year. It has already caused splits within the PP between the old guard and younger conservatives.
Figures
in Spain show that during
this period of economic recession birth rates have gone down, indicating
that
women make decisions on what they believe they can afford to do. Many
women are
asking themselves ‘can I really feed and cloth another child?’ and
finding the
answer is 'no'. Women ovulate once a month for about forty years, a woman could get
pregnant every nine months for decades. Of course contraception is better, but it's
not prefect. So occasionally a single teenage girl or a married mother of four
is going to have to terminate an unwanted pregnancy. To take abortion away from women in
emergency
situations, at a time when jobs are scarce (a quarter of the population
are
unemployed) and when social security for an unemployed mother works out
at
about 400 euro a month for rent, bills, food etc., can only be described
as a vicious attack on an already seriously pressurised social group. To accuse women who refuse
to become baby mills of perpetrating a holocaust is a step too far for people on both sides of the camp in Spain.
http://www.irishleftreview.org/2014/03/10/bishop-accuses-spanish-women-holocaust/
For more info on social security in Spain:
http://www.seg-social.es/Internet_1/Trabajadores/PrestacionesPension10935/Prestacionesfamilia10967/Prestacioneconomica27924/Cuantias/index.htm
Further info on Concha Carretero here: Fallece Concha Carretero, compañera de las trece rosas rojas, by Gustavo Vidal Manzanares, nuevatribuna.es http://www.nuevatribuna.es/articulo/sociedad/fallece-concha-carretero-companera-trece-rosas-rojas/2014010119202599608.html
