![]() ''Now the debate has shifted to the rights of women. ''The fundamentalists have lost the debate'' in Portugal, said Helena Pinto, president of UMAR, a Portuguese abortion rights group. The second is that if states did criminalize abortion, they would face a backlash as the public focus shifted from the fetus to the woman. Wade would probably mean bans on abortion only in a patchwork of Bible Belt states, pregnant women would travel to places like New York, California and Illinois for their abortions. ![]() Some 20,000 Portuguese women still get abortions each year, mostly by crossing the border into Spain. The first is that abortion laws are very difficult to enforce in a world as mobile as ours. Portugal offers a couple of sobering lessons for Americans who, like Mr. ![]() ''Lots of reporters came and covered Portugal and said it had this medieval process.'' ''It's very embarrassing,'' said Sandy Gageiro, a Lisbon journalist who covered the trials. There's a growing sense that while abortion may be wrong, criminalization is worse. In a sign of the changing mood, Portugal's president recently commuted the remainder of the nurse's sentence. A recent opinion poll shows that people here now favor abortion rights, 79 percent to 14 percent. Portugal, like the U.S., is an industrialized democracy with a conservative religious streak, but the trials have repulsed the Portuguese. Both trials ended in acquittals, except for a nurse who was sentenced to eight and a half years in prison for performing abortions. ![]()
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