News
Featured Image

(40 Dias Por La Vida) 40 Days for Life is the Christian and pro-life initiative that focuses its activity on silent prayer, fasting, and peaceful vigils in front of different abortion clinics worldwide. In Spain, during the month of October, and since September 22, several campaigns of 40 days of uninterrupted prayer are underway in cities such as Madrid, Barcelona, Cadiz, Cordoba, El Puerto de Santa Maria, Pamplona, Valladolid, and Vitoria. Throughout the first 30 days of the campaign, 40 Days for Life has welcomed more than 3,000 volunteers who, for approximately 11,600 hours, three times the minimum time required, have prayed in silence in front of Spanish abortion centers.  

However, this campaign has taken a different turn from those previously carried out. On September 21, a day before the beginning of the 40 Days for Life campaigns, the Socialist Party of Spain (PSOE) submitted for consideration a new law proposal that seeks to ban pro-life activity around the abortion centers, to put an end to what they call “harassment of women who seek abortions.”  

Since that moment, several media organizations have echoed this campaign and on many occasions have gone to the places where groups of volunteers meet to pray. Likewise, from the different parliamentary groups and political parties in the Congress, various opinions have been issued, most of them accusing 40 Days for Life of being a campaign of harassment, aggression, and intimidation of women.  

During the debate held in Congress on September 21, different speakers expressed their opinions on the socialist proposal. Íñigo Errejón, representing [left-wing political coalition] Más País – Equo, declared that “the ultras do not go to the clinics to pray because they are not going to save souls; they are going to make the decision more painful and more difficult for adults on a day when they have to be calm, and they are going to increase the pain a little more.” Sofía Castañón, deputy spokesperson for [left-wing political alliance] Unidas Podemos in Congress, described the activities of the pro-life groups as “an atrocious and anti-democratic harassment,” and the Socialist deputy Laura Berja affirmed that “the only purpose of these undesirables is to make women feel worse.”  

However, what they do not say is that, during the first 30 days of the campaign, four women from Madrid, one from Barcelona, and one from Valladolid, after seeing the 40 Days for Life groups, approached them to ask for help and to tell them that, thanks to having seen them there, they had changed their minds and had decided to continue with their pregnancies.  

Six lives saved by the “stalkers.” Six fetuses who, without these posters that “attack women’s rights,” would have been aborted three days later. Six mothers who, without the presence of these pro-lifers, would have made their choices while coerced by fear and lacking freedom of decision. Six lives and all those that have been saved by the women who haven’t been entering the abortion centers in recent weeks because their consciences are moved, because they see other alternatives, because they receive help.  

40 Days for Life’s Declaration of Peace, mandatory for all volunteers who come to pray in front of abortion centers, expressly rejects any aggressive or violent act. “Acting in a violent or harmful manner immediately and completely disassociates me from the 40 Days for Life campaign,” the Declaration states. Thus, it also states that the only purpose of the volunteer is to pray in silence and “seek peaceful solutions to the violence of abortion.” Nevertheless, various media and television programs have accused 40 Days for Life of harassing and disrespecting women.  

Moreover, initiatives such as 40 Days for Life are considered violent. Last October 12, the Congress supported prison sentences of three months to one year for pro-lifers who gather in front of Spanish abortion centres. Likewise, since the beginning of the Madrid campaign, the Delegation of the Government has sent the police daily, even several times daily, to intimidate the volunteers by requesting their personal information, even when their right of assembly does not need the permission of the government (as they are less than 20 people and are not considered a demonstration). The police, under the Government order, collects the personal information of the volunteers, such as their ID numbers, names, their parents’ names, and even their mobile phone numbers, with no official document or communication about the gathering of these data. If any volunteer refuses, they are informed that they may be fined, even though the legal advisors of the campaign insist that recording the personal data of the volunteers borders on illegality and is an abuse of their functions.  

Even so, 40 Days for Life has continued its work. Through their social media profiles and hashtags such as #RezarNoEsAcosar (#PrayingIsNotHarassment) or #LosValientesRezamos (#TheBravePray), they have continuously posted photographs of volunteers coming to pray peacefully and silently and have eagerly invited politicians opposed to their activity to come and observe it for themselves.  

“We believe that praying is not harassment; freedom of assembly, freedom of expression, freedom of association: all these freedoms are freedoms of the individual that cannot be taken away from us,” said Pablo Mariñoso, a member of 40 Days for Life to DeDerechas media.

40 Days for Life continues to encourage Spanish citizens to join the prayer campaign to save lives.   

For more information about 40 Days for Life in Madrid, please visit www.40daysforlife.com and https://40diasporlavida.online/.

Reprinted with permission from 40 Dias Por La Vida.