Weaponizing the law: Acción Familiar and ‘pro-life’ strategic litigation in Spain (1985–1990)

This article explores the history of the Spanish ‘pro-life’ movement during the final decades of the twentieth century. While recent sociological scholarship has characterised the Spanish ‘pro-life’ movement of the 1980s as being dominated by uncoordinated and inexperienced organisations that were dependent on the Catholic Church, our analysis of primary sources, such as legal documents and media accounts, seeks to provide a more nuanced interpretation by examining the impact of Spanish ‘pro-life’ activism on access to abortion following the partial decriminalisation of 1985. To analyse this impact, we focus on Acción Familiar, an organisation that played a leading role in deploying strategic litigation against both abortion regulations and providers. We examine two examples of this strategic litigation: administrative litigation against the Royal Decree that liberalised the abortion marketplace in 1986, and criminal litigation against doctors who performed therapeutic abortions in a public hospital in Pamplona in 1986. Our case study shows that Acción Familiar employed a ‘conventional’ litigation strategy to achieve objectives typically associated with ‘direct action’: the harassment and intimidation of doctors. In doing so, the organisation created symbolic and material barriers to abortion, restricting access to the procedure in Spain within the legal framework of partial decriminalisation (1985–2010), a time when abortion was permitted in certain circumstances.