Drive to legalize abortion in Argentina reaches key vote
By Ruby Mellen and Ana Vanessa Herrero,
Natacha Pisarenko AP
After years of debate, the Argentine Senate is set to vote on legislation that would make the predominantly Roman Catholic country the largest in Latin America to legalize elective abortion.
Argentina’s House of Deputies approved the bill championed by President Alberto Fernández this month by a comfortable margin. The vote is expected to be closer in the Senate, which is scheduled to take it up Tuesday.
Argentine media project that 33 senators will vote for the bill, 32 will vote against it and five remain undecided. If the result is a tie, Vice President Cristina Fernández de Kirchner, a former president who supported similar legislation in 2018, will cast the deciding vote.
Elective abortion is legal in Cuba, Uruguay, Guyana and parts of Mexico. In Argentina, as in much of the region, abortion is permitted only in the case of rape, incest or to save the life of the mother.
[Argentina just got closer to becoming the largest country in Latin America to legalize abortion]
The legislation would allow elective abortion in the first 14 weeks of pregnancy. It’s the ninth bill in the past 15 years to address the country’s abortion laws; it’s seen as having the best chance to legalize the procedure.
The 2018 proposal passed the House but failed in the Senate. Then-President Mauricio Macri, a conservative, said he opposed abortion but would sign the legislation if it prevailed.
This time, the country has a new leader — and he’s spearheading the effort. Fernández made legalization a key campaign promise. He described it as a matter of public health.
“The debate is not saying yes or no to abortion,” he said in November. “The dilemma that we must overcome is whether abortions are performed clandestinely or in the Argentine health system.”
The bill has drawn opposition from another prominent Argentine.
Pope Francis described abortion as a question of “human ethics.”
“Is it fair to eliminate a human life to solve a problem?” he asked in a letter to supporters made public last month.
Agustin Marcarian
Reuters
An antiabortion demonstrator prays outside Argentina’s National Congress this month as abortion rights activists demonstrate in support of legalization.
The vote has deepened long-standing divisions in a country with both a huge Catholic presence and a burgeoning feminist movement.
Viviana Canosa, a journalist and antiabortion activist, joined fellow opponents in the streets on Monday, the Catholic Feast of the Holy Innocents, to oppose the legislation.
“We hope the senators will vote with their hearts, with conviction, and in favor of the motherland,” she said in a video shared on her Twitter account.
Other religious believers had a different perspective.
“Jesus would never have condemned a woman for getting an abortion. For terminating a pregnancy,” Marta Alanis, founder of Catholics for the Right to Decide, told The Washington Post. “He was always against condemning women.”
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Feminist groups say the legislation was about safety and equality.
“Senators should never play politics with the lives of women and girls in Argentina,” Paula Ávila-Guillen, executive director of the Women’s Equality Center, said in a statement. “It’s no secret that our backwards and outdated abortion laws are not deterrents, in fact they exacerbate the problem by leading to unsafe clandestine abortions that threaten the health and lives of the most vulnerable women and girls.”
Health Minister Ginés González García said in November that more than 3,000 women have died in Argentina since the early 1980s as a result of underground abortions.
Activists on both sides plan to demonstrate in cities across the country ahead of the vote Tuesday.
Even if the bill passes the Senate, Alanis said, opponents “will make every effort to prevent” women from getting abortions.
“A woman deciding to get an abortion is the thing conservatives can’t tolerate.”
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She was raped, had a stillbirth and almost died. Then she was charged with the murder of her fetus.
An 11-year-old pleaded for an abortion after she was raped. She was forced to give birth.
