Spanish lawmakers vote to legalize abortion, instate parental notification

[popehippo]

Spain's lower house voted Thursday to lift legal restrictions on abortion up to 14 weeks. The measure is expected to pass the Senate.

From the Associated Press:

Under the current law, which dates back to 1985, Spanish women could in theory go to jail for getting an abortion outside certain strict limits -- up to week 12 in case of rape and

Comments

[yunghustlaz]

I acknowledged it has political prisoners, but the US does too, EU countries do, Israel has some 1,700. Most of the world does, it's a horrible thing for sure and I support Human Rights Watch and all of these other groups working for their release, I'm merely stating that Cuba, beyond the political issues, is a very empathetic socialist state, with better services for their civilians that we do in the US. We don't even have healthcare, what a lot of good our 'democracy' gives us (mind you, true democracy would come in the form of syndicalism and anarcho-socialism, probably the closest thing we could get to good, functioning direct democracy).

Also, I'm not a big fan of Fidel, I just support the revolution, and like most socialist revolutions that came out of coups, it has leaps and bounds to go on human rights (Although things are getting a lot better under Raul.) Venezuela and Bolivia I think, are both better socialist governments in the sense they were elected through socialist democracy, but where else would Cuba be without the revolution? Still under Batista? Under some other US puppet president? Never mind that the US didn't exactly help to try to reform Cuba's human rights, with the CIA fueling Fidel's paranoia (the amount of assassination attempts against him is insane) and the embargo having a direct effect on the wellbeing of the Cuban peoples and the state.

I think it all comes down to weighing the value of the social programs (high literacy rate, extremely effective healthcare, almost no wealth inequality, stable government) vs. the damage of the authoritarian style of rule (repression of political criticism, human rights abuses, etc.). But I think, on the global scale, Cuba pulls ahead. The US has done far, far worse than Cuba, as has Europe and plenty of the eastern world, and I was not trying to make the point that Cuba's some -fantastic- state, but that it's an imperfect state that's the focus of some unwarranted vilification, and not criticism, but outright vilification that it's a broken, impoverished country reminiscent of Stalinist Russia, when it's more a better run version of modern China without the whole ethnic oppression and controlled territories and without political oppression nearly as bad as the CCP.