The right of women to have an abortion in Argentina is at risk. Javier Milei seeks to repeal the law on voluntary interruption of pregnancy approved by the Argentine Congress at the end of 2020 after a large mobilization in the streets of feminist movements. Deputies of the far-right party led by Milei, La Libertad Avanza (LLA), presented this Wednesday a bill that classifies abortion as a crime and punishes women who decide to terminate their pregnancy with prison sentences.
The text not only means going backwards with the current law, which allows women to have abortions legally and free of charge up to the 14th week of gestation, but it is even more restrictive than the Penal Code that governed between 1921 and 2020, because it does not He authorizes it not even in cases of rape but gives the last word to the judge. The legislators argue that they decided to eliminate the cause of non-punishment in pregnancies due to rape “because they understand that it has been systematically interpreted as a justification for the practice.”
The bill proposes punishing “a woman who causes her own abortion or consents to someone else causing it” with penalties of up to three years in prison. In turn, it contemplates sentences of between one to four years for those professionals who help a woman to terminate her pregnancy and sentences of between three to ten years for those who perform an abortion without the woman's consent. If the surrogate mother died as a result of the intervention, the sentence could be increased to 15 years.
The text provides that the only case in which interrupting a pregnancy is not punishable is when the purpose is to avoid an imminent danger to the life of the mother, “as long as the danger cannot be avoided by other means.”
Abortion is an issue that divides Argentine society. Congress debated it for the first time in 2018, during the Government of Mauricio Macri, and after approval by the Chamber of Deputies it was finally rejected by the Senate. Legalization was approved at the end of 2020 with clear support from the then president, Alberto Fernández.
In these three years, nearly 250,000 voluntary and legal terminations of pregnancy were carried out in the public sector and maternal mortality fell by almost half: from 23 annual deaths in 2020 to 13 a year later.
The parliamentary initiative presented by LLA is not a surprise. Milei and her vice president, Victoria Villarruel, had already spoken out harshly against legal abortion during the electoral campaign and had anticipated their desire to repeal the current law.
Smokescreen
The text sent to Congress seeks to divert attention from the harsh parliamentary defeat suffered by Milei this week. The star project of the ruling party, a document with 664 articles that provided numerous tools and extraordinary powers to the president to quickly dismantle the Argentine State, returned to the starting point this Tuesday after the opposition rejected several key points.
The ruling party is in a clear minority in both chambers: it has only eight of the 257 deputies and seven of the 72 senators. It is unlikely that he will obtain sufficient support to reopen a discussion that polarizes Argentine society in the midst of the serious economic crisis that the country is going through, with the highest inflation in the world (211.4% in 2023) and more than 40% of the population mired in poverty.
LLA legislators consider that it is necessary to prohibit abortion because they consider that the crisis that Argentina is suffering “is not only political or economic, it is fundamentally moral.” The project bears the signature of five legislators, including the head of the bloc in Deputies Óscar Zago and the influencer and former Milei makeup artist Lilia Lemoine.
The presentation of the project has had an immediate reaction from feminist movements. With the slogan of “Not one step back” this very night, public assemblies have begun to be called to organize against this government initiative.
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