Hundreds of thousands of people calling for legal, safe and free abortion on demand in Argentina showed their outrage on August 9 when they gathered in the early morning in the pouring rain after the Senate voted down a bill that would have both decriminalized abortion and allowed free access to the procedure in public and private hospitals.
Despite this disappointing blow to reproductive rights, the headway made in Latin America to legalize safe and accessible abortion — dubbed the “green tide” after the bandannas worn by women’s rights activists around the continent — will be invaluable to future struggles.
The Senate vote against the bill came a few months after the lower house of Congress voted in favor by a 129-to-125 margin—and after years of campaigning for the issue, led largely by Ni Una Menos, a grassroots anti gender-based violence movement.
The bill is known as “ley de interrupción voluntaria del embarazo” — IVE or “law of voluntary interruption of pregnancy.”
Although IVE had flaws, such as mandating a five-day waiting period for procedures and limiting abortions to the first 14 weeks of pregnancy, it would have been a major victory not only for women’s rights groups who championed it, but Argentina as a whole.
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Under the current law, those seeking abortions can be charged and imprisoned unless they can prove that the fetus poses a danger to their life or that the pregnancy is the result of sexual assault.
Those who seek abortions under these terms are constantly scrutinized about what qualifies as enough risk to their lives, and survivors of sexual assault often find it difficult to prove what happened to them. The burden of providing this evidence means that even people who meet the draconian qualifications of the current law are often forced to carry pregnancies to term.
It also means that people risk their lives and undergo unsafe abortion procedures. Orlando James Jenkinson writing in the New Internationalist, cited statistics…