Argentine Activists Reapply Pressure for Abortion Legalization

President Fernández is called upon to upkeep his promise to legalize abortion. Pictured: the Casa Rosada, Argentina’s Presidential Palace. (Source)

Fearing that Argentina’s struggle with the COVID-19 pandemic will overshadow other legislation, proponents of abortion rights have resumed their push for President Alberto Fernández to legalize abortion. 

Over 1000 influential public figures in Argentina signed the online petition “Legal Abortion 2020” on September 27, reminding government officials of abortion-related health complications for thousands of women. They claimed that the President must live up to the National Campaign for the Right to Safe and Free Legal Abortion, which aided his electoral victory in 2019 over the conservative incumbent, then-President Mauricio Macri.

Upon his inauguration in December 2019, President Fernández pledged to deliver on his campaign promises. This was the opposite approach from the direction that Marci took as president two years earlier, when he refused to endorse a bill proposed to legalize abortion. Marci could not have risked alienating the religious and traditionalist components of his electoral base. The law eventually failed in the Senate in a vote of 38against, 31 in favor, and two abstentions.

When President Fernández included an abortion legalization bill among his electoral promises, abortion activists celebrated the public decision. Although the president initially said that he would bring a bill before Congress within ten days of his declaration, Argentina encountered its first COVID-19 case two days later on March 3, derailing attempts to pass the legislation. 

If his promise is eventually fulfilled, the bill would make Argentina the fourth country in Latin America to legalize abortion without major limitations; Uruguay, Guyana, and Cuba are the only countries that currently permit abortions on request in an overwhelmingly Roman-Catholic region where Church opposition to abortion heavily influences political opinion. 

43 million Argentinians out of a total population of 45 million practice Roman Catholicism and the current head of the Vatican, Pope Francis, was Archbishop of Buenos Aires from 1998 to 2013.

An Argentine abortion ban from 1921 permits women to have abortions only if the pregnancy emerged from rape or threatens the woman’s life or health. Doctors and patients who take part in an illegal abortion face one to four years in prison. 

So that President Fernández could pass a swift national lockdown and other legislation to prepare for the novel coronavirus, abortion proponents offered to briefly abate the pressure for reproductive rights.

However, the abortion debate resumed after months of lockdown and the worsening conditions of the pandemic. Other pre-pandemic debates between Argentine political factions, such as economic inequality, corruption, and the historical divide between the capital of Buenos Aires and the countryside, have also respawned.

Abortion attempts are the second highest cause of maternal deaths in Argentina. Incidents such as an eleven-year-old girl who had to deliver a baby due to the deliberate inaction of provincial officials and doctors, despite her pregnancy being a result of rape, regularly produce outrage among the pro-abortion public.

Anti-abortion activist groups such as Pro-Life Unity have staged massive rallies in an attempt to halt the passage of pro-abortion legislation. One March for Life rally on March 23, 2019 drew 300,000 participants in Buenos Aires and over two million nationwide.