On November 25, 1923, the feminist writer Mercedes Pinto gave a speech in Madrid that made newspaper headlines, turned her into an enemy of the state, and forced her into exile. Mandated by the Spanish dictator Miguel Primo de Rivera a few days after her speech, her exile took her first to Uruguay, and then to Argentina, Chile, Cuba and Mexico for extended periods of time. In every place, she advocated for liberation. While she was ostracised by Spanish publishing houses, she found editors in South America who appreciated her resistance to Spanish imperialism. She became a civil servant in Cuba, Uruguay and Chile, and frequently agitated for women's rights across Central and South America. In Uruguay, she started her own theatre company and founded a cultural centre where she hosted famous artists and writers from around the world. Under the pseudonym Sor Sulpicio, she hosted a radio programme and had columns in magazines, all the while continuing to write her own novels, poems, and plays. In film studies classes today, her name appears only occasionally, as a footnote. She is referred to as a little-known writer of a novel that fictionalised her battle for her sanity in an abusive marriage: a novel that was eventually adapted by Luis Buñuel into the film Él (This Strange Passion, 1953).

As a survivor of domestic violence, Pinto was well-acquainted with silence, and the many ways that it restricts autonomy. Even before her separation from her first husband, she had, in the early 1920s, become an active participant in the women’s movement for suffrage and equal rights in Spain, which was noteworthy for its resistance to the eugenics movement. At the time, most Spanish doctors were proponents of eugenics, and it was an accepted ideology among Spanish political elites. Based on Pinto’s experiences in her first marriage, her infamous lecture ‘Divorce as a Sanitary Measure’ (‘El divorcio como medida higiénica’) proposed that divorce could function as a medical treatment for abuse passed down from an unwell parent onto their spouse and children. Women’s suffrage was legalised in 1931, and divorce the following year, but the latter was repealed at the start of the Franco dictatorship, in 1939. Women in Spain were not granted the right to divorce again until the country became a democracy in 1981. When divorce was first legalised, Pinto had already illegally remarried in South America. She would never return to Madrid.

Born in San Cristóbal de La Laguna in Tenerife in 1883, María de las Mercedes Pinto Armas de la Rosa y Clós was writing short stories from the time she was a girl. She was the daughter of a well-respected writer, Francisco José María de los Remedios Pinto de la Rosa, who passed away when she was eleven years old. The poet Antonio Zerolo read one of her poems at the funeral, and those in attendance were so moved by it that she became known in her town as ‘La Poetisa Canaria’.

In 1909, Pinto married Juan Francisco de Foronda y Cubillas. He soon began to exhibit signs of jealousy that were exacerbated by paranoid episodes (possibly a symptom of schizophrenia). He abused Pinto emotionally and physically. Against his wishes, and out of fear for their children’s safety and emotional development, Pinto admitted him to a sanatorium in 1919. Against the clinician’s advice, but with help from his family, he was soon discharged.

She fled to Madrid to raise her three children where she hoped her husband wouldn’t find them. There, she began searching for a way to separate from him officially, but divorce was only legal in Spain if a wife was deemed unfit to carry out her duties. In the early 1920s, Pinto met with a lawyer, Rubén Rojo, in the hope that he would be able to find a loophole in this law. While he failed to secure her a divorce, she did fall in love: in 1922, she gave birth to a child fathered by Rojo.

A year later, she began reading her poetry in public: primarily meditations on memory and history, love and loss, that evoked Tenerife’s landscapes and Tinerfeña identity, some of which were published in her first collection, Brisas del Teide (1924). During the 1920s, she befriended the writer Carmen de Burgos, who was famous for her women’s rights column ‘Readings for Women’ (‘Lecturas para Mujeres’) in the Madrid-based newspaper Diario Universal, which she started writing in 1903. In 1904, Burgos had published El divorcio en España (‘Divorce in Spain’), a book that included surveys which asked the Spanish public for their opinions on divorce. Throughout her career as a journalist and activist, she defended educational and labour equality, agitating for suffrage and the reform of unjust laws. Burgos believed that feminists needed to engage directly with eugenicist thinking, despite believing it to be bigoted and lacking in evidence. She gained notoriety for refuting phrenology, which claimed a link between brain size and intelligence and on that spurious basis deemed women inferior. These doctors also believed women to be more passionate than men, arguing that women’s nervous systems were more volatile. Burgos asserted that men’s propensity to wage war and commit ‘crimes of passion’ proved the opposite. It was after meeting Burgos that Pinto became an active participant in the feminist movement in Spain and ended up delivering her famous speech. Burgos had been invited to give the closing speech at a conference on sexual hygiene and eugenics at the Universidad Central de Madrid because of her reputation for disagreeing with the leading doctors and politicians of the time. But she fell ill a week before; Pinto visited her friend at her bedside, and Burgos asked her to take her place.

Dr Navarro Fernández, the conference organiser, was not particularly enthusiastic about this change, but Burgos managed to convince him by claiming (falsely) that Pinto was the secretary of the Ibero-American Women's Institution, over which Burgos presided. When Pinto decided at that moment that she would talk about divorce, Fernández reminded her that this was a ‘Sanitary Conference’ (‘Conferencia Higiénica’). With the help of Burgos, Pinto argued that she hoped divorce would prevent contagious and hereditary diseases. Pinto understood, as de Burgos did, that she would need to construct an argument using the framework of eugenicist discourse to appeal to those who had the power to change the law: doctors, lawyers, politicians. Given the extent to which Catholic doctrine was integrated into Spanish law, arguing that all women should have the right to divorce their husbands must have seemed an impossible task. Pinto likely skewed somewhat conservative as a result, proposing that women’s right to divorce would stop mental health problems from being passed onto children, and preserve the health of the Spanish population as a whole. In other words, it might have seemed to Pinto that the only way to expand women’s access to divorce was to focus on men whom eugenicists would have deemed ‘unfit’. Doctor Fernandez agreed to Pinto’s proposed argument.

According to various accounts, the audience was responsive throughout Pinto’s speech. Some clapped, others heckled, and, at the end, those in favour stood to cheer en masse. Prince Ludwig Ferdinand of Bavaria, who had been invited to the conference (apparently considering himself a doctor), was charmed by Pinto’s charisma, and she soon received a formal invitation to meet with him at the palace where he lived with his wife. To her surprise, a number of important religious figures were present, as well as his wife, Princess Paz. But they had their own agenda. The princess wanted Pinto to help ladies of high status establish Catholic Action Committees across Spain. Pinto politely declined the offer; to her, the prospect of collaborating with royalty was abhorrent. Pinto’s rejection didn’t sit well with the princess, who was, Pinto suddenly realised, married to the Prince of Bavaria. After Pinto left the room with him, he told her that Pinto might soon be forced to leave the country due to his wife’s displeasure. Pinto hoped the princess would soon forget about their meeting.

Three days later, Pinto received a letter from Carmen de Burgos. Burgos wrote that the Spanish dictator, Miguel Primo de Rivera, had summoned Pinto for an urgent interview. He castigated her for not knowing that Spain was unable to legalise divorce due to an agreement with the Vatican. “I cannot allow it,” he told her. “People would start talking about other things, each one more forbidden than the next.” Granting women the right to a divorce would open the door to further demands, he was warning. This was their first and only meeting. As a result of widespread discontent, Primo de Rivera was soon overthrown – but only after Pinto had gone into exile.

When Pinto told her friends about the conversation, they, worried for her safety, urged her to leave the country as soon as possible. They drafted a letter requesting passage to Montevideo, claiming that Pinto was intending to visit a relative who was ill. (Uruguay had already legalised divorce and introduced universal suffrage by this time.) Pinto’s friends were right to be nervous: she soon received notice that, by order of Primo de Rivera, she was to be formally banished to Fernando Po in Spanish Guinea (now Bioko, part of Equatorial Guinea). With Rojo and her children, Pinto fled to Portugal in secret, where they boarded a ship for Montevideo.

As the translators of ‘Divorcio como medida hiegiénica’, Florencia Marchetti and I were immediately struck by how skilfully Pinto wove together her argument. We were equally impressed by how she used the theme of the conference as a Trojan Horse to call attention to how often women were abused in their marriages, and to argue that women should be empowered to end those marriages – not only for their own health and safety, but also for the sake of their children. Within the speech, Pinto explores how the laws and social networks of 1920s Spain were in no way sufficient as protection against domestic abuse, detailing how difficult it is to obtain the required witness testimonies of such violence. Within this system, dead women were the only form of definitive proof. Women who spoke counted for little to nothing. We still see this logic at work today, of course, with the law/the state continuing to disregard the accounts of women who experience intimate partner violence.

Pinto’s first marriage felt to her like a medical emergency. She suffered panic attacks, depression, loss of self-esteem and a diminishing sense of reality. In these circumstances, divorce could be reframed as a medical treatment, rather than a legal process for couples who no longer upheld the ‘sanctity’ of marriage. Knowing that the conference audience included people who believed women shouldn’t have rights at all, Pinto allies herself with convention: Christian faith and eugenicist vernacular. Over the course of her speech, this conservative angle is juxtaposed with the arguments she wants to make: women in abusive marriages are silenced and generational trauma is incontrovertible.

That parents with mental health issues might pass these onto their children is not necessarily a controversial claim, although the emphasis now lies less on genetic inheritance than environmental exposure. Pinto does not make a sociopolitical or contextual argument, and does not argue for a change in eugenicist thinking; she even uses terms including ‘feeble-minded’ in her speech. Her argument risks implying every abusive partner is struggling with untreated mental health issues. Whether Pinto subscribed to this type of thinking is unclear, though her pursuit of universal suffrage, and later campaigns to raise literacy rates among children, might point to the contrary. All the same, Pinto’s use of eugenicist thinking is undoubtedly frustrating for the contemporary feminist reader – and using the ‘master’s’ framework didn’t stop her from being banished from Spain.

Read the speech, however, and her aim is clear: immediate disbandment of the law that prohibits women from seeking divorce. While Pinto did not succeed in this goal, her words provoked an outcry that may have given her some satisfaction. Luis Buñuel’s adaptation of Él into a work of psychological horror, and news that Jacques Lacan often screened this film to his students, might have brought her some satisfaction too.

Pinto’s novel begins with a prologue entitled ‘INVOCATION OF PAIN’: ‘Come here, pain, so unjustly treated by men; come closer to me, for I know you so well, and you have cared for me since childhood like the favourite flower in your garden.’

Pinto depicts pain as wound and friend, the sole companion of an agonised woman struggling to free herself from an abusive marriage. Él is written in fragments, organised into ‘notes’ instead of chapters. Predating the 21st-century poetic prose novel, Pinto stages a conversation between text and image, life and fiction, pain and ecstasy, freedom and restriction. She brings together lists, lyrical reflections, and reproductions of woodblock prints. Through text and image, the novel chronicles a difficult marriage from the perspective of a woman who is discovering her voice while someone else is trying to hold it back.

Events in the novel recall Pinto’s own experiences. The protagonist consults doctors on how to live with an abusive partner; one responds, ‘I fear you will die tragically... the only salvation would be if he died now.’ Another scene seems to dramatise a moment in Pinto’s speech in which she discusses how women are often disbelieved and ostracised when they tell friends about their abuse. In support of Pinto’s argument, the novel describes the protagonist’s relief and return to bodily autonomy after her husband is placed in a sanatorium:

As the days passed, they brought me self-assurance. At last, I had found myself. A woman, returning. A soul restoring itself to a physical form. At all hours I kept tapping myself constantly until I was convinced: “It is I.” And I felt an indefinable joy slowly rising within me.

Pinto said that Él was the work of art closest in truth to her own life. Buñuel said that his adaptation was the project he ‘put the most of [himself] into’. Buñuel’s sister, Conchita, was married to a husband who was violent, paranoid, and jealous. According to Buñuel, his brother-in-law once believed he saw Buñuel making faces at him on the street, then ran home and grabbed his gun; his immediate family managed to convince him that Buñuel was abroad at that time. Combined with Conchita’s stories, Pinto’s novel became, in Buñuel’s hands, a film of profound surrealist horror, one which places the audience in the mind of the protagonist, Gloria Vilalta (Delia Garcés), who finds herself questioning her perception of reality when she is abused by her jealous husband. The film imitates the fragmented form of the book with an abrupt shift to the future that is then followed by an extended flashback. On the whole, it is distinctive not just because it reveals the psychology of a survivor of domestic violence (and the mad hallucinations of her abuser), but because its narrative structure destabilises our understanding of truth, questioning whose version of events (abuser or survivor?) is validated, and articulating the impossibility of verifying it.

In Pinto’s novel and Buñuel’s adaptation of it, separation is the key to freedom – or, at least, the start of it:

The house welcomed me in peace.

The sunlit corridors, the spacious rooms, without ‘Him’.

The murmuring garden, the white rooftops, without ‘Him’.

At night, I opened the doors of my shadowy bedroom, without ‘Him’.

—Micaela Brinsley

---

‘Divorce as a Sanitary Measure’

tr. Micaela Brinsley, Florencia Marchetti

Your Royal Highness, ladies and gentlemen,

It is with the attention and particular interest I have shown since my youth to all things related to health and wellbeing that I listened to the ideas, so beautiful in nature, expressed over the course of Sunday’s lectures.They have remained with me like birds made of light forging a path across the sky, an incandescent trail over a sea that is full of the shadows of our debilitated and diseased traditions.

Of these ideas, one remained most acutely in my mind, like a tragic melody ringing incessantly in my ears. An idea that is fixed, persistent and fatal. That of inheritance. It fills me with devastation to visualise an endless queue of innocent children bearing a crushing burden: the stigma of a shameful and cruel infirmity.

To the other women here: would you not concur that there is no greater happiness than that of discovering in the features of our dear children the traits of our beloved husbands who gave them life?

Love, an incomparable word. To love and to be loved! The eternal desire of the true woman.

When we love a lot and love well, we want our children to be echoes of their fathers, an exact likeness. “They look so much like their father!” our friends tell us, and we look at our children and declare with pride, “They’re an exact copy!” In them, we see the divine confluence of all the kisses, all the caresses, all the passion of our shared love.

But there is a terrible disease which, although not as vulgar or horrific as syphilis or tuberculosis, is also hereditary and drives the soul of the uninfected spouse to constant terror and unrest.

I come here today without an ulterior motive of any kind; I come here as a Christian and a simple woman who has cried and seen others lament. I’m here to advocate for my pain and the pain of other women whose paths in life have crossed with mine. I’m here to set my pain forth, for your consideration and especially that of doctors, judges, and to all men of science, so that you may identify an effective remedy. I’m here as if I were someone infected, who, seeing her gangrene-ridden foot, turns to the doctor and pleads, “Cure me, cut off whatever is necessary, just end this pain.” And I ask the same of you: do whatever needs to be done for our malady to be stopped and eliminated. I’m pleading with you to study our pain and to heal us.

This terrible disease – difficult to diagnose without constant, long-term observation by specialists – is the moral insanity that the masses call ‘persecution mania’ and is scientifically referred to as ‘paranoia’.

Some gentlemen who participated in Sunday’s conference advocated for the acquisition of a doctor’s note as a prerequisite for marriage, in order to provide certainty that a partner is not infected with tuberculosis, nor any venereal diseases. But how treacherous that, when it comes to insanity, there are no such certificates.

I know that this infirmity can be borne in equal measure by both men and women. But I am a woman, and I’ve come here to speak on behalf of women. For a man married to a woman infected with this malady, everything is in his favour: “Poor him,” people say, “his wife is insufferable, possessive, violent, a fiend; she’s nuts, her behaviour is incredibly strange.” In the end, the husband, with the support and encouragement of his friends, his servants and the entire world, takes the wife and places her in a sanatorium or ships her back to her parents, and it is he who keeps the children with him because the wife is, as people say, “not right in the head”.

So they say. To be ‘not right in the head’ implies that she, without reason, is jealous of a supposedly ‘faultless’ husband, gets angry without cause, and turns the home into an endless nightmare, etc. etc. Consequently, the man is freed.

On the other hand, the woman who marries a healthy man, who might even have a medical certificate disclosing that he’s well, that he does not have tuberculosis or venereal diseases, can be sure that their children will be healthy. Having heard from alienists, I believe, in addition, that ‘paranoia’ is usually hidden during infancy and early youth, and generally develops when the increasing concerns and pressures of daily life rear their heads and put pressure on the mind.Alienatist is an archaic term for a psychiatrist. This is to say that, at some point after marriage – within those first years after the children are born – raising them and providing for their education can elicit, in the husband or wife destined for madness, a darkness that previously lay dormant.

Would a doctor examining the blood and lungs of a man who is about to be married be able to tell of the dark sadism that will soon emerge between the sheets of the marital bed?

Would a doctor be able to detect the torture a miserable wife is subjected to? With his professional and humanist eye, could he spot the trembling of her fingers and the tensing of her neck, the brutality and bite marks that fill the sadist with such pleasure?

These infinite cruelties can only be conceived by a mind so insane, so absurdly possessive. They are the result of desolate sleepless nights, caused by the most appalling depravities.

And all of this, which should already be sufficient cause for divorce, is not, since the Law considers as evidence only the beatings that result in death, and only when they are accompanied by testimonies from a certain number of external witnesses who observed the event. These cannot include members of the family, or servants. Therefore, no matter how disgusting the torture or how brutal the violence, the countless horrors from his paranoid mind amount to nothing in the eyes of the Law. The wife needs to wait to be shot (and hopefully he fails) for the judges to rule that, since he didn’t manage to kill her, she likely didn’t know her place! As for the witnesses, of course you all understand the unlikelihood of bystanders encountering the torment that usually comes about in the bedroom and at night; after all, it’s not common for friends to be in our homes during these hours and, if the wife screams for help, the husband will surely punish her to such an extent that she will not do it again.

Additionally, in the social circle that helped the husband of the ‘ill’ wife by locking her up in a sanatorium or sending her off to her parents, permitting him to take sole custody of their children, even other women will take the husband’s side. If the wife tries to reach out for the same type of assistance to deal with her husband, they will inevitably turn their backs on her. As a general rule, the public only occasionally acknowledges the veracity of this horrible injustice.

An argumentative, mistrustful man who is always ready to ruin conversations with an annoying phrase and who sometimes even becomes aggressive, is nothing more than a man with a bad temper or, at worst, a ‘weird guy’ in the eyes of strangers. But strangers only see these things from afar; they don’t know about the ruses and tricks through which these men– who aren’t weird but in actuality sick– can completely hide the horrid misdeeds they commit in their home from the public.

This deceptive madness, which leads the sufferer to perceive wickedness and maliciousness in others, disparages the wife too; his rage will be seen as ‘bad humour’ and his sadism as exaggerated by a wife who misunderstands the intensity of his passionate nature, and his possessiveness as an ‘excess of love’. This is what ends up happening! Public opinion turns on the wife and people say there must be something wrong with her for him to feel so jealous.

Can the Law help us? Not at all, as madness alone is not cause for divorce.

Doctors are the only ones who can help us in our aspirations.

And what are our aspirations? This is the thesis of my lecture.

DIVORCE AS A SANITARY MEASURE

I imagine that many women listening here will think that I am a free thinker – too modern. Therefore, I would like to state plainly that I am a Christian and believe the home and family to be sacred pillars. But not a home full of oppression, nor a family conceived in the middle of terror!

It is for this reason that I suggest divorce as a sanitary measure.

But the measures that have been celebrated, and even adopted, by great nations– an insurance policy obtained by the two parties before marriage, for example– is insufficient; it is also not enough for the groom simply to provide a doctor’s note ensuring the health of the family line. After the wedding, the profligate and careless husband might bring home a disgusting disease that he has picked up on the path of obscenity, rendering the doctor’s note, which provided a guarantee that the marriage was a healthy one, null and void.

While the bride-to-be still has the chance to renounce a dangerous union, the married woman is in danger of becoming sick and subsequently rearing children debilitated by this cursed virus. What remedy remains for her?

Before, I mentioned what it means for me to love; I spoke of the joy of seeing in a child made from love the smile of their adoring father. I want you now to conjure this image in your mind’s eye: the wife of a madman who contemplates, while standing over the crib of her adored child, the terrifying features of the father. I ask my sisters in the audience: do you know what it is like to perceive in the beloved eyes of a child the reflection of a madness that will mutilate their lives?

And make no mistake: mark them it will. Even if they do not inherit the disease of the father, they will be marked by the fact that they were conceived in the midst of terror and loathing; they will be feeble-minded, epileptics or perverts. What else could become of a child borne from a mother full of pain and terrible fear, and from a father possessive and insane? I ask you to reflect on this for a moment, or ask your doctors, who are better able to respond.

And the more exacerbated the paranoia, the more children the woman will be forced to bear, since his arousal will increase in line with his insanity, and he will refuse to leave his wife alone. From this point of view, insanity is worse than other inherited illnesses in which one is still in possession of reason. If a man has syphilis or tuberculosis, but is well-mannered, of good character, and a gentleman, he will refuse to have more children; he will decide to take an excursion, or agree on a friendly or temporary separation which will prevent the wife from getting infected and avoid reproduction. However, while the paranoid person – who is irresponsible and who believes himself to be completely sane, who always interprets indifference and lack of love in the actions of others and then increases his own attempts at intimacy – gets crazier, the transmission of a fatal inheritance to his offspring increases.

Disasters such as these are depicted by master playwrights including Eugène Brieux in his Les Avariés, by Gouriandec in the ‘Mortal Kiss’, by Henrik Ibsen in his celebrated Ghosts, and countless others.This is an error in the original. Le Baiser Mortel was written by M. Loic Le Gouriadec. Listing them all would be impossible.

The competent doctors who are listening to me know that the hazards that befall a woman married to someone affected by paranoia are innumerable.

For those of you less familiar with medicine, you need only read countless works of science on and novels about persecution mania for this to become obvious – Leonid Andreyev’s novella El médico loco (The Crazy Doctor) or Pedro Mata’s Irresponsables (The Irresponsibles). There are other examples from popular culture that narrate such behavior. Ibsen, whom I just mentioned, paints a picture of a man whom I (and this is my perception) consider a paranoid person in John Gabriel Borkman – a play not as popular as Ghostsbut no less remarkable. What can John Gabriel, with his dry heart, his excessive love of money, and his total abnegation of sentimentality in favour of selfishness be but a narcissist?

There is no doubt that the only step to take is divorce – and quickly, too: a divorce based on an urgent note written by a medical specialist that prevents the birth of new offspring or the violent death of the wife. Even our laws have not been able to prevent this type of death, nor do they punish its perpetrator after its occurrence. And, after a while, he will be brushed aside as a ‘reckless person’ and avoid punishment.

In support of my thesis, I could name endless eminent doctors – both foreigners and those of this nation – as well as men of science from all over the world. But I have my own method and, before relying on experts, I would rather reach hearts and minds, and touch the human soul through the power of persuasion, than assume arrogance and show off my knowledge as if I were the Encyclopedia of Economics.

With reverence, I present Doctor Navarro Fernández, who is a longtime advocate of humanity and, above all, of that part of humanity that bears the mark of an inherited and shameful stigma. In a series of conferences that have travelled across the scientific world, Doctor Navarro Fernández has, with his graceful Spanish demeanour, penetrated the most ignorant of minds with the most difficult of ideas. “If a machine that produces essential goods,”he says, more or less in these words, “is faulty due to the collapse of a wheel or the absence of a screw, and the manufactured product is of a bad quality or even dangerous and harmful, the State will determine that this machine must be disassembled and its pieces be dismantled, one at a time. Thus, if marriage were to be considered such a technology for the purpose of making children” as the Catholic faith does not recognise it for any other purpose, “it is the responsibility of this same State to disassemble this technology from the very moment at which it exists outside of the proper conditions to produce humane lives.”

And Doctor Navarro’s idea, which I have rendered faithfully here, probably without the elegance of his style, represents a feeling a large number of Spaniards will recognise: real love for humanity, as it should be.

STEPS FOR THIS TYPE OF DIVORCE

I said at the start of my speech that I do not know the right steps to take and I’ve come here to locate those who can propose them; that said, my personal suggestion is as follows: the wife should – before he sets fire to the house or, as the saying goes, ‘eat the children for breakfast’, but after experiencing his sadistic behaviour, unfounded jealousy, unstoppable rage, etc. etc. – be authorised to ask competent medical professionals to observe the husband. In the event they detect this terrible sickness, these doctors must report the case so that it can be subject to the Law which will necessitate divorce as a sanitary measure, in order to avoid the passing on of this terrible malady.

In Sweden, the law of divorce has been enforced following the transmission of syphilis, and all other hereditary diseases.

The question that arises in response to this is always the same: what do we do about the children?

I’m going to repeat myself. I’m not advocating for a concrete solution. I am not that pretentious. My role is to reveal a great cruelty and beg you for a remedy. As far as children are concerned when it comes to divorce, the solution has always seemed to me that they should remain in the care of the morally and materially advantageous party. I’m not referring to the type of divorce that is easy to obtain in those States of America where people are able to separate for trivial reasons. Instead, I propose a refined divorce process established on irrefutable data that demonstrates which party is the cause of harm. The children will be placed in the custody of the healthy parent: much as they are in the flawed process of divorce which currently prevails in Spain, where the parent deemed more honest and moral (typically, the man) tends to be favoured. If, as I’m asking, divorce as a sanitary measure is established, then children would be given to the healthy spouse so that, if at all possible, they do not become innocent victims.

And what about child support?

There is an obligation for the father to support the children if he has the money to do so. In the worst of scenarios, the case would be managed as it would in the event of his death. No one blames a father for his death, and no one questions the importance of the children needing support, should they be left with nothing.

The State should protect children as their own, as members of the society it governs; it is more preferable to have children under the umbrella of public support than to have them contaminated with tuberculosis or violently murdered at the hand of a dangerous person.

While I was finishing preparing my notes – with sincerity, from the depths of my soul, like a scream of anguish from a tormented generation – I was warned by some people, including women, that my ideas were too bold and that they might not find much resonance here. However, after turning to Doctor Navarro and telling him of my doubts, he encouraged me by saying that I would find, here, both the entry point and conclusion to my crusade. So, it is with his blessing, and guided by his hand, that I am here.

And to those who are too shy to come forward, who listen to me and find my petition too narrow, I have limited myself to asking only for distance from this danger, without going as far as to beg for happiness. I’m going to read a paragraph from an article written in a medical journal by another Spanish doctor, which has been copied innumerable times. (For good doctors do not always come from foreign associations with names that are difficult to pronounce; no, we have many great professionals at home.)

The publication of a notable book cemented his glory after it was praised by the press in Madrid. This eminent doctor who specialises in mental illness is named Doctor Camino; he is the director of the wards for the mentally ill in the city’s prominent Military Hospital and various other sites for those afflicted with this malady. In this article, he addresses with beauty and valour a point that I did not make in my lecture, which I quote here:

In the case that the Law remains as is and does not grant absolute divorce, I believe that the aggrieved spouse, insofar as they are in full possession of their dignity and innocence, should continue along the path marked by nature, to search for the love and home to which they are entitled – wherever they may find it. Above all the considerations and social contracts that civil and ecclesiastical laws are founded upon, there is the supreme interest of the species to encourage and direct the sacred fire of human beings towards grand initiatives and endeavours with loving and kindred arms.

These are precious and inspiring words for those who prefer not to see humanity in its infancy bound by a terrible inheritance, with chains that bruise the flesh of children who should be protected in the lap of a healthy mother, and under the protection of a father clean in body and soul; with parents who can be proud in the contemplation of their children under the resplendent sky of the Spanish home.