After a bill to legalise abortion fell in the senate, women’s rights leaders say it is just a temporary setback

This article is more than 2 years old

This article is more than 2 years old

Women’s rights activists in Argentina have pledged to continue the fight for legal abortion, despite a resounding defeat in the country’s senate when a majority of men over 50 years of age voted against a bill that would have legalized elective abortion up to the first 14 weeks of pregnancy.

After more than 15 hours of debate, legislators voted 38 to 31 against the bill early on Thursday, although opinion polls showed the reform had strong public support.

Tens of thousands of women have taken to the streets in a string of protests in favour of legal abortion, and campaigners said that Argentina’s newly empowered women’s movement was determined to keep up the pressure for reform.

Play Video 0:38 Argentina pro-choice activist: 'Sooner or later we'll have an abortion law' – video

“Things will never be the same, because society has been changed by these five months of debating the law,” said the journalist Soledad Vallejos, a member of the #NiUnaMenos collective that began amid protests against gender violence and became a major force behind the proposed law.

“We won,” wrote the journalist and activist Mariana Carbajal, in an article in Página/12. “We won because arguments based on religious beliefs showed how deceitful they are.”

The senate’s vote leaves in place a law, drawn up nearly a century ago, that penalizes women with up to four years in prison for undergoing an abortion – although statistics show that there is an average of one abortion performed every 90 seconds in Argentina, where as many as 450,000 unsafe illegal abortions are carried out every year.

“Let’s recognize that we’re facing a public health tragedy,” said Magdalena Odarda, a senator for Rio Negro province.

“We’re not deciding abortion, yes or no. We’re deciding abortion in a hospital or illegal abortion, with a clothes hanger, or anything else that puts a woman in a humiliating, degrading situation, a real torture,” she said.

Argentina abortion defeat shows enduring power of Catholic church Read more

Argentina’s powerful Catholic church played a major part in the campaign to block the reform in Pope Francis’s home country. According to the Clarín newspaper, the pontiff personally requested anti-abortion legislators to lobby their senate colleagues to reject the bill.

A number of senators who voted in favour of reform reported threats from Catholic groups. “I’ve been dodging crucifixes,” said Senator Pedro Guastavino, who said he had received countless threatening and insulting messages “in the name of god”.

The country’s bishops issued a statement Thursday morning thanking “the senators and organizations who pronounced themselves in defense of life”.

A large number of senators invoked their Catholic beliefs when voting against the bill.

“An abortion is no less tragic if it is performed in a surgery,” said Senator Esteban Bullrich, a former education minister of the current government with strong religious beliefs. “The objective is for there to be no more abortions in Argentina.”

But the senate vote fell along clearly marked lines of age and gender. Male senators voted 24-17 against the bill, while female senators were evenly divided at 14-14; most senators over 50 years of age voted against the reform.

One of the bill’s most ardent defenders was the senate’s oldest member, the 82-year-old film-maker and activist Pino Solanas, who accused his fellow senators of punishing women for enjoying sex.

“Pleasure is a human right,” proclaimed Solanas in a thunderous speech, addressing himself most of the time to the massive vigil held outside congress by mostly young women who supported the bill.

“Bravo, girls!” said Solanas. “Tonight is just a brief respite. This will be law. No one can stop the wave of the new generation.”

Many activists shared that view and expressed hope that legal abortion will become available in 2020 after new congressional elections and fresh presidential elections in 2019.

The former president Cristina Fernández, who is now a senator, said: “This law won’t be voted tonight – not next year either – but it will be approved the year after or the next.”

As president, Fernández had declared herself against abortion, but she voted in favour of the bill, saying she had been made to change her mind by the “thousands and thousands of young girls who have taken to the streets”.

During the debate, a number of senators said change could come even sooner, if the supreme court ruled on abortion.

“The supreme court is progressive. I believe in the supreme court,” said Senator Miguel Pichetto.

The negative vote will pile pressure on the centre-right government of President Mauricio Macri, which had hoped to benefit from a progressive policy to counterbalance the economic belt-tightening that has followed its recent bailout agreement with the International Monetary Fund (IMF).

A positive vote would also have helped to distract attention from the government’s apparent lack of interest in pursuing human rights trials against former officials implicated of crimes under the 1976-83 military dictatorship.

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In an apparent effort to offset disillusionment among young voters, ahead of next year’s presidential elections, Macri officials have said they will now seek to decriminalize abortion through a reform of the country’s penal code later this month – although the practice would remain illegal and prison sentences would remain in place for doctors preforming abortions.

Although Macri became the first Argentinian head of state to permit the debate of abortion in congress, he and the leading members of his party have declared themselves strongly opposed to abortion rights. Most of his PRO party’s senators voted against the bill.

“We’ve shown that we have matured as a society, and that we can debate with the depth and seriousness that all Argentines expected ... and democracy won,” Macri said after the vote.

Despite the final result of the vote, many women said they believed Argentina would have legal abortion eventually.

The journalist Silvina Márquez, who joined the crowd outside the congress building during the debate, said: “We might not have a law today, but it is going to happen. Argentina is not going back, it is important for the women – especially for the young women. So sooner or later, we’ll have an abortion law.”

Nearby, a group of secondary school students, megaphone in hand, chanted: “Beware, beware, machistas [chauvinists] beware, all Latin America will be feminist.”









