Lower house of Argentina’s congress votes to legalize abortion

The lower house of Argentina’s Congress has approved the legalization of abortion, according to NBC News. The bill will now head to the Senate, which voted down a similar bill two years ago. It is expected that the Senate will address the bill before the end of 2020.

The proposed law was approved in a 131-117 vote with six abstentions after a 20-hour session. It would expand abortion in Argentina to allow abortion up to the 14th week of pregnancy. Currently, abortion is legal in the country only in cases of rape or when the mother’s life is at risk (though abortion is never actually medically necessary).

Disadvantaged women in Argentina recently wrote to Pope Francis, who is from Argentina, asking him to help stop the legalization of abortion. After medical assistance centers were installed in poor neighborhoods in 2018, women there say they have been pressured to avoid pregnancy — and to abort if they do become pregnant. Now, they fear the pressure will increase.

“Our voice, like that of the unborn children, is never heard,” they wrote. “They classified us as a ‘factory of the poor’; ‘workers of the State’. Our reality as women who overcome life’s challenges with our children, is overshadowed [by women who claim to] represent us without us giving our consent, stifling our true positions on the right to life.”

READ: Thousands march in Argentina to protest country’s efforts to legalize abortion

Argentina’s health minister Dr. Ginés González García, who called preborn children a “phenomenon,” rather than the human beings that they are, argued in favor of legalizing abortion with the excuse that it is already legal in other “religious” countries such as Italy, Spain, and Ireland, which are largely Catholic as Argentina is. “Now we are moving forward in Argentina,” he said. “If this were a masculine problem it would have been resolved a long time ago.”

This statement is blatantly false. Pregnancy is not a “feminine problem,” but a gift in the existence of a new human being who is in the first stages of development, created biologically by both a man and a woman. Pregnancy and abortion are wrongly considered women’s issues, and therefore, abortion advocates believe that women have to have the power to kill their own children in order to be treated as equal to men. In reality, abortion violently kills innocent human beings and frequently causes trauma to their mothers.

Argentina’s President Alberto Fernández has promised to legalize abortion by the end of the year. If the bill passes the Senate, Argentina will be the third Latin American nation to legalize abortion, following the lead of Cuba, Uruguay, and Guyana. Abortion is also legal in Mexico City.

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