Argentina on Wednesday last week legalised abortion when the Senate voted by 38 to 29 in favour of a bill that allows the procedure through to the fourteenth week of pregnancy.
Under the previous law, abortions were only allowed in case of rape or when the mother's life was at risk. Across Latin America, abortions on demand are only available in Cuba, Uruguay, and in parts of Mexico.
The initiative was spearheaded by President Alberto Fernandez and his ruling left-wing bloc. He described the bill as guaranteeing women’s “health care”.
Amnesty International called the vote a victory for “human rights” and a sign of the waning power of the Catholic Church. “The movement in Argentina has been an inspiration,” said Erika Guevara-Rosas, the Americas director at Amnesty International. “As we become more progressive societies, where the Catholic Church wields less power, these movements create an opportunity for states to acknowledge that abortion is a human right.”
Pope Francis hardly intervened in the debate in his native land, though he did reply in a handwritten note to a November letter from eight pro-life women from the Buenos Aires shanty towns who said their daughters were growing up believing they had no right to have children because they were poor.
“Our voice, like that of unborn children, is never heard … 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,” the 18 November letter informed the Pope.
In his 22 November reply, Francis stated that abortion is “a matter of human ethics” and asked: “Is it fair to eliminate a human life to resolve a problem? Is it fair to hire a hitman to resolve a problem?”
Apart from this note Francis limited his comments to a reflective tweet before the Senate session: “The Son of God was born an outcast, in order to tell us that every outcast is a child of God. He came into the world as each child comes into the world, weak and vulnerable, so that we can learn to accept our weaknesses with tender love.”
If such sentiments were meant to sway the vote, they were lost on the green-clad women and men with green face masks who celebrated rapturously outside the legislature when the result was announced.
By contrast, subdued but not downhearted, was a group calling itself “defenders of two lives” who had set up an altar with a crucifix under a blue tent. One was a teacher. Whatever the law, “I will not teach that it is a right to kill, murder, a baby who has no voice,” she said.
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