Madrid’s regional parliament has passed what is being called the ‘conceived unborn child’ law. As soon as a pregnancy is medically accredited it will count in determining a family’s eligibility for certain benefits. After the fourteenth week of the pregnancy, if this is their third child, families will be able to access additional benefits such as discounts on public transport, grants and other subsidies. If the pregnancy is lost, families will not have to repay the benefits already received.
The left’s argument is that the Partido Popular is using a ‘Trojan horse’ strategy: making the law appear benevolent and pro-family on the surface while shifting the way a foetus is described by the state
Isabel Díaz Ayuso, the right-wing president of the Madrid region, frames this new law as a pro-family initiative designed to tackle plummeting birth rates. Spain’s fertility rate has collapsed from 2.8 in 1975 – the year that the dictator Francisco Franco died – to 1.1 in 2024. It’s one of the lowest rates in the world and far below the level (2.1) at which existing population levels would be maintained in the absence of immigration.
Alberto Núñez Feijóo, the national leader of Ayuso’s Partido Popular, was quick to offer his support for the new policy: ‘When a woman is expecting a child, I understand that this should be reflected in public sector aid and subsidies, [so that it] has an economic and social impact for the woman and the family expecting it.’ Borja Sémper, the national spokesman for the Partido Popular, said that the aim is ‘to help families, support motherhood, promote work-life balance, and ensure that having children in Spain is no longer seen as a heroic feat.’
The combative Ayuso goes further. She describes Spain’s national abortion figures – around 100,000 annually – as ‘an atrocious number’ and Spain’s ‘failure as a society’. After the bill was passed she said, ‘A baby on the way is a blessing… Every life matters; every life is unique, irreplaceable, from conception until the last breath. Let us legislate and align in favour of life.’ Taking aim at her left-wing critics, she added: ‘Remembering this infuriates those who impose frivolous, unhinged ideological agendas and who know deep down that we are right and that we are stirring consciences.’
The left is certainly infuriated, describing the measure as ‘a nod to the opponents of abortion’. The Madrid wing of the socialist PSOE party promptly dismissed the bill as ‘a legislative botch job built on slogans rather than legal rigour.’ And a spokeswoman for Más Madrid, a party to the left of the PSOE, said that the bill ‘questions women’s right to make decisions about our own bodies. We won’t accept that rights won over decades by the feminist movement are sacrificed in the name of defending families.’
The left’s argument is that the Partido Popular is using a ‘Trojan horse’ strategy: making the law appear benevolent and pro-family on the surface while shifting the way a foetus is described by the state. If the unborn child is treated as a child for the purposes of public benefits, critics fear that it becomes easier, politically and rhetorically, to argue later that it should be treated as a child for other purposes too. What appears to be a family-support measure begins to look like a challenge to Spain’s national abortion laws.
It seems the controversy over this law has only just begun. The Partido Popular has promised to scale up the bill and make it national policy if it is in power after the next general election, which is due by August 2027 at the latest. Current polling suggests that the Partido Popular together with Vox, a party further to the right, will secure a majority.
Vox not only voted in favour of the law but also complained that it was ‘insufficient’, and pushed for amendments demanding ‘national priority’ in access to benefits – meaning that they should go to Spanish citizens ahead of immigrants. It also sought explicit recognition of the foetus as a ‘human reality deserving specific protection from the moment of conception until natural death.’
In recent years, Spain’s divisive argument over abortion, though not resolved, has at least been contained. This new law may be about to change that.
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