Abortion: the sentinel right

There are rights that protect specific freedoms. And there are others that, in addition, allow us to measure the democratic quality of a society. The right to abortion belongs to this second category. Not only because it guarantees that no person can be forced to carry a pregnancy against their will, but because it establishes a fundamental limit on the power of the state: deciding about reproduction. That is why it is one of the most reliable indicators of democratic health.Every time this limit is questioned, the debate goes far beyond abortion. What is at stake is the relationship between people's autonomy and the ability of public authorities to intervene in bodies, families, and the model of society. It is no coincidence that sexual and reproductive rights are among the first objectives to be overthrown by authoritarian projects. When a power seeks to redefine who is part of the community, who should reproduce it, and what values should sustain it, it ends up governing reproduction.We saw it in 2013 with the Gallardón counter-reform. Feminist mobilization demonstrated that frontally restricting the right to abortion had an enormous political cost. But reactionary offensives do not disappear when they fail. They mutate.Today the debate is filled with concepts such as birth rate, family, maternity, "culture of life",unborn child or demographic crisis. It seems we are changing the subject, but the dispute remains the same: who governs reproduction.This displacement responds to a profound crisis. Precariousness, the crisis of care, aging, difficulties in accessing housing, and migratory movements question the way we sustain life. Nancy Fraser describes it as a crisis of social reproduction, a crisis that affects the conditions that make life itself possible.Faced with this, feminisms propose expanding rights and guaranteeing the material conditions so that all people can freely decide whether they want to have children, when, and under what conditions to raise them with dignity: the horizon of reproductive justice.Authoritarian projects, on the other hand, ask what reproduction the state needs. They annul reproductive autonomy as a starting point and open the way to a demographic and identity policy, an old and powerful tool of social control with which Margaret Atwood made us shudder in her dystopia, and which today reappears in many Western democracies.The pieces are fitting together. The unborn concept of Ayuso and Feijóo as a legal category; the family law from the PP-Vox agreement in Andalusia; the maternity offices in Alicante and Seville; the mandatory listening to fetal heartbeats in Castile and León; the speeches on "national priority" and the theories of "great replacement" are not unrelated or independent initiatives, but rather form part of the same conceptual framework. An entire political architecture that progressively displaces the debate and hierarchizes which families and which maternities deserve to be protected and which do not so much.Its strength is that they no longer need to attack the right to abortion head-on, it is enough to shift common imaginaries. To make the question stop being whether women should be able to decide about their bodies and become about how the state should respond to the demographic crisis or the protection of "life". The Overton window on reproduction: it does not eliminate rights overnight, but rather turns what seemed unthinkable into socially acceptable.

Therefore, the right to abortion continues to be the center of the conflict. Not because it is the only right in dispute, but because it is the place where it is decided whether reproduction will be at the service of people's autonomy or the interests of the state.Like ancient sentinels, this right is the first to detect the threat. It warns us that something is changing in the relationship between the state and citizenship. And then the question we will have to ask ourselves is: what kind of democracy needs to make reproduction a state policy?