BUENOS AIRES – Argentine lawmakers took an important step on Friday to legalize abortion and fulfill a promise made by President Alberto Fernández that made women’s rights a central tenet of his government.
The approval of the law in the Argentine lower house of Congress by 131 votes to 117 after more than 20 hours of debate was a legislative victory for Mr Fernández, who has provided funds and political capital to improve conditions for women as well as for gays and transgender people, even if Argentina grappling with the greatest financial crisis of a generation. The law would have to go through the Senate to officially legalize abortion in the country.
“It’s a wrong dilemma to say it’s one way or the other,” said Elizabeth Gómez Alcorta, Argentina’s Minister for Women, Gender and Diversity. “It’s not like stopping renegotiating the debt to pursue this policy.”
Argentina would be only the fourth nation – and by far the most populous – to legalize abortion in Latin America, where strict abortion laws are the norm and Catholic doctrine has long guided politics.
Thousands of activists on both sides of the issue surrounded Congress on giant screens from Thursday evening to Friday morning after the debate.
They have been divided into clearly identified areas depending on their position. On the one hand, abortion lawyers turned their area into an open air party that danced through much of the hot summer night.
“I have goosebumps,” said Stefanía Gras, a 22-year-old psychology student who stayed overnight, after the vote. “I feel like we’re making history.”
Another, particularly smaller, group opposed to legalization held open-air prayers all night, though most realized that the bill would likely be passed when the morning light crept across the sky.
“I’m deeply saddened,” said Paloma Guevara, a 24-year-old nutritionist who had a megaphone and gathered all night with anti-abortion activists. “Our hope now is the Senate, and the good thing is we’re better prepared than we were two years ago.”
Center-left professor of law, Mr Fernández, stood up as an advocate of marginalized communities, contrasting with his wealthy mid-right predecessor Mauricio Macri. He placed the inequality between gender and sexual orientation alongside social, economic and racial inequality and promised to eliminate them.
But he took office a year ago during a deep recession, and the coronavirus epidemic hit Argentina within three months of he was sworn in. The country imposed one of the longest and strictest lockdowns in the world, but the virus was still spreading, leaving it among the nations with the highest per capita death rates.
Despite these difficulties, 61-year-old Fernandez considered gender and sexual orientation to be a priority in his government and even surprised some activists who had joined his initiatives.
Earlier this year the government put in place a quota system that reserves at least one percent of federal public jobs for transgender Argentines.
“It was really something that surprised us all,” said Maryanne Lettieri, an English teacher who runs an organization that helps other transgender people find work. “I hope one day we don’t need quotas, but now we need them.”
Fernández’s 2021 budget foresees more than 15 percent of planned spending on initiatives that promote gender equality, including funding violence prevention programs, the inclusion of women who were not part of the formal workforce in the pension system and combating the Human trafficking.
Mr. Fernández has also asked his team not to schedule meetings that only include straight men. As of August, an audience of more than four people with the President should have women or members of the LGBTQ community making up a third of the attendees.
The emphasis on making Argentina fairer while the nation grapples with inflation, rising poverty, and oppressive debt may seem like a diversion or a populist ploy from Mr Fernández to some. Some critics, such as Patricia Bullrich, a former security minister who now heads Mr Macri’s PRO party, have argued that at least “it is not the right time” to discuss issues such as abortion.
“I would work a lot more on economics and people’s realities,” she said on CNN Radio Argentina. “I would have other priorities.”
However, government officials say they see investing in creating a more equitable country in Argentina as part of the path to a more prosperous future.
Updated
Dec. 11, 2020 at 9:29 am ET
“More equality and access to opportunities are part of the vision we are pursuing in this government,” said Economics Minister Martín Guzmán.
The abortion law, which would make it legal to terminate pregnancies up to 14 weeks, is the most famous and controversial part of this plan.
Abortion in Argentina is only allowed in the event of rape or if the pregnancy poses a risk to the mother’s health. In practice, doctors, especially in rural areas, are often reluctant to perform legal abortions for fear of legal repercussions.
According to a report by the Argentine Network for Access to Safe Abortion, at least 65 women died as a result of abortions between 2016 and 2018. During the same period, 7,262 girls between 10 and 14 years of age gave birth.
Argentina would have legalized abortion in 2018, despite loud protests from the churches and the Argentine Pope Francis. Mr Macri, who was president at the time, said he was against the measure but urged Allied lawmakers to choose their conscience.
Fernández contrasted sharply with his predecessor and conspicuously submitted the bill to Congress last month. He wore a striking green tie, the color representing efforts to legalize abortion.
“I am convinced that it is the responsibility of the state to look after the life and health of those who decide to terminate their pregnancy,” Fernández said in a video posted on Twitter.
In doing so, he fulfilled an election promise that some reproductive rights activists feared they would be lost in the face of the heavy toll the coronavirus and economic crisis have wreaked on Argentina. The bill was revealed when Mr. Fernández’s team struggled to renegotiate the $ 44 billion debt with the International Monetary Fund and reopen a paralyzed economy.
Political analysts saw the approval of the abortion law in the Argentine lower house of Congress, where most lawmakers clarified their position before the debate began, as a concluded agreement. The biggest hurdle for abortion lawyers will be in the Senate, where the measure narrowly failed in 2018 after strong resistance from the senators of the rural provinces, where the Roman Catholic and Protestant churches have a greater influence.
Despite the loss, massive mobilization ahead of the 2018 vote, especially by young women, has spurred a new generation of feminists in Argentina, who have taken to the streets in large numbers to advocate legal abortion and wider representation to use.
Legalizing abortion would meet one of the main demands of this movement and would bring Mr Fernández his biggest legislative victory, which would give further impetus to a national project that has already begun to transform Argentina.
Because the pandemic hit women particularly hard, making them the majority of the newly unemployed, Argentina led the way as the country that has taken the most gender-based measures to respond to the crisis, according to a United Nations Development Database.
“In Argentina, the pandemic has fully exposed the inequality between men and women,” said Mercedes D’Alessandro, who heads the gender equality department at the Ministry of Economic Affairs. “Even in such an unfavorable context, this agenda has evolved.”
Argentina’s increased focus on gender equality comes at a time when other countries in the region are also ensuring that women have a voice in government decisions.
In neighboring Chile, for example, voters approved a referendum in November to draft a new constitution, which also called for gender equality among delegates to the constitutional convention. This makes the country the first in the world to have a charter drawn up by equal numbers of men and women.
Yet few measures are likely to have such a regional impact as if Argentina legalized abortion together with Cuba, Uruguay and Guyana.
