The “Não Obrigada” platform, the lay movement most visible during the recent referendum campaign for a “no” to abortion, hopes the result of the referendum last Sunday will lead the State to support maternity in a more active way. One of the representatives of the movement, the physician João Paulo Malta, has proposed, to this end, that “the State should grant to the mother of each newborn child a benefit higher than 500 euros”, i.e. a figure equivalent to the cost of each abortion performed in state-run hospitals: according to the statement of the Portuguese Ministry of Health, the cost of such an abortion would in fact vary between 500 and 750 euros. Martin said that the question of abortion “should not be considered definitively resolved, and it continues to divide society, since the majority of the Portuguese (56%) did not vote and opted for abstention”. The representatives of the platform have underlined the effort made to raise public awareness throughout the country, “which confirmed the real national dimension of the mobilization contrary to the legalization of the voluntary interruption of pregnancy”. In particular, Isilda Pegado expressed satisfaction for “this exercise of citizenship that had generated various civic movements completely independent of the political parties”. This mobilization – in her view “had assumed a dimension without precedent in the history of Portuguese democracy”. For example, the new pro-life initiatives taken on the occasion of the referendum include the project “lives with life” (www.vidascomvida.org), which aims to realise a wide-ranging database with all the information that may offer solutions to problems linked to pregnancy and maternity: the list of institutions and the type of assistance they provide, qualified centres and contacts to obtain help, and the possibility of benefiting from the contribution of time made available by anyone wishing to get involved in volunteer service. “Our efforts will not stop so long as there is even a single mother who, for lack of information and support, is induced to have recourse to an abortion”, say the promoters of the initiative.
