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Copenhagen/Madrid (dpa) - A private clinic in Spain offering illegal abortions to Danish women was to be investigated following a Danish television documentary, Spanish officials said Monday.
Earlier, Danish doctors and politicians expressed shock and concern after a television documentary broadcast Sunday on public broadcaster DR disclosed that Danish women travel to a private clinic in Spain to undergo abortions way past the Nordic country's legal abortion limit.
According to the documentary, women were offered the terminations up to week 32 or eight months into term.
Denmark's legal abortion limit is 12 weeks, while Spain's is 24 weeks, the documentary said.
A pregnant DR reporter used a hidden camera to document when a physician offered to perform an abortion at week 32.
The head of the private CBM clinic in Barcelona, Carlos Morin, said during the documentary that women from Germany, Britain and Spain whose legal options had been exhausted were also offered terminations.
Morin on Monday accused the Danish reporter of "lying," and said clinics under his direction had never performed illegal abortions.
Catalan health official Lluis Torralba said the psychologist who interviewed the Danish journalist advised her not to abort, because she was pretending to have psychological problems.
Only 95 British women have had abortions in Catalonia between 1994 and 2005, but no Danish women, according to Torralba.
The regional health ministry nevertheless launched an investigation into the claims contained in the Danish report. Similar allegations by a British newspaper were investigated in 2004, but no evidence of illegal abortions was found.
Danish Health Minister Lars Lokke Rasmussen earlier said he had asked Danish authorities to contact Spanish authorities over the allegations.
"This is a healthy child of 31 weeks and three days, which would not have had any problem surviving. You kill it and then abort it. In my view that is murder," chief physician Charlotte Wilken-Jensen of the gynaecological unit at the Amtssygehuset hospital in Roskilde said.
Another woman was interviewed saying she contacted the clinic via the internet two years ago, and paid 35,000 kroner (6,000 dollars) to have an abortion performed when she was seven months pregnant.
Danish women can apply for an exemption to have an abortion past the legal 12-week limit.
The head of the review panel, Torben Hviid, said he was aware some women travel abroad after being rejected, but he only knew of women who went to countries that offered abortions up to week 24.
Politicians and physicians said improved follow-up and counselling was necessary for women whose applications for late-term abortions had been rejected.
Copyright 2006 dpa Deutsche Presse-Agentur GmbH
