[ Wednesday’s victory is the result of five years of mass
protest marches by Argentina’s grassroots women’s movement, which
began as a Twitter campaign against gender violence.]
[[link removed]]

ARGENTINA LEGALIZES ABORTION IN LANDMARK MOMENT FOR WOMEN'S RIGHTS  
[[link removed]]


 

Tom Phillips, Amy Booth and Uki Goñi
December 30, 2020
The Guardian
[[link removed]]


*
[[link removed]]
*
[[link removed]]
*
* [[link removed]]

_ Wednesday’s victory is the result of five years of mass protest
marches by Argentina’s grassroots women’s movement, which began as
a Twitter campaign against gender violence. _

Pro-choice activists celebrate in Buenos Aires after Argentina's
Senate approved a bill to legalize abortion on December 30, 2020.,
(Photo: Emiliano Lasalvia/AFP via Getty Images)

 

Argentina [[link removed]] has become
the largest Latin American country to legalize abortion after its
senate approved the historic law change by 38 votes in favour to 29
against, with one abstention.

Elated pro-choice campaigners who had been keeping vigil outside
Buenos Aires’s neoclassical congressional palace erupted in
celebration as the result was announced at just after 4am on
Wednesday.

Women screamed with delight, sweeping their friends into tight hugs
and jumping in ecstasy. Many wept tears of joy. Victory music kicked
in and green smoke filled the air. A triumphant message flashed up on
a big screen above the joyful crowd: “We did it!” it said. “ES
LEY!” (IT’S LAW!).

“I’m very emotional,” said 25-year-old Melany Marcati, who was
among the celebrators. “There are no words to describe what your
body feels after fighting for something for so long. I cried a lot,
which I wasn’t expecting.”

The campaigner Ingrid Beck said: “The struggle for women’s rights
is always arduous, and this time we even had to contend with a
pandemic, so I am overjoyed with this result.”

The bill, which legalises terminations in the first 14 weeks of
pregnancy, was approved by Argentina’s lower house earlier this
month
[[link removed]] after
being put to congress by the country’s leftwing president, Alberto
Fernández
[[link removed]].

“Safe, legal and free abortion is now law … Today we are a better
society,” Fernández celebrated
[[link removed]] on
Twitter after the result was confirmed.

Fernández has previously said that more than 3,000 women had died as
a result of unsafe, underground abortions in Argentina since the
return of democracy in 1983.

The landmark decision means Argentina becomes only the third South
American country to permit elective abortions, alongside Uruguay,
which decriminalised the practice in 2012, and Guyana, where it has
been legal since 1995.

Cuba legalised the practice in 1965 while Mexico City and the Mexican
state of Oaxaca also allow terminations.

Giselle Carino, an Argentinian feminist activist, said she believed
the achievement in the home country of Pope Francis would reverberate
across a region that is home to powerful Catholic and evangelical
churches and some of the harshest abortion laws in the world.

[Pro-choice demonstrators celebrate]
[[link removed]]

 Pro-choice demonstrators celebrate. Photograph: Ricardo Ceppi/Getty
Images

In most countries, such as Brazil, abortions are only permitted in
extremely limited circumstances such as rape or risk to the mother’s
life, while in some, such as the Dominican Republic and El Salvador,
they are banned altogether.

“I feel incredibly proud of what we’ve been able to achieve. This
is a historic moment for the country, without a doubt,” said Carino,
head of the International Planned Parenthood Federation, Western
Hemisphere Region.

“It shows how, in spite of all the obstacles, change and progress
are possible. Argentinian women and what’s happening right now will
have an enormous impact on the region and the world,” Carino added,
pointing to parallel struggles in Brazil, Chile and Colombia.

Colombian activists recently petitioned the constitutional court to
remove abortion from the country’s criminal code while campaigners
in Chile hope a new constitution
[[link removed]] might
lead to expanded women’s rights.

In the region’s most populous nation, Brazil, activists are waiting
for the supreme court to rule on a 2018 legal challenge that would
decriminalise abortion in the first weeks of pregnancy.

Mariela Belski, Amnesty International’s executive director in
Argentina, called the result “an inspiration to the Americas”.

“Argentina has sent a strong message of hope to our entire
continent: that we can change course against the criminalisation of
abortion and against clandestine abortions, which pose serious risks
to the health and lives of millions of people.”

[Argentina’s vice-president Cristina Fernandez de Kirchner speaks
during the debate on the abortion bill.]
[[link removed]]

 Argentina’s vice-president Cristina Fernández de Kirchner speaks
during the debate on the abortion bill. Photograph: Matias
Baglietto/Reuters

Wednesday’s victory is the result of five years of mass protest
marches by Argentina’s grassroots women’s movement, which began as
a Twitter campaign against gender violence that used the hashtag
#NiUnaMenos (“Not one less” – meaning no more women lost to
gender violence).

The first spontaneous march came on 3 June 2015, in reaction to the
murder of 14-year-old Chiara Páez, who was found buried underneath
her boyfriend’s house after being beaten to death and a few months
pregnant.

“Aren’t we going to raise our voices? THEY ARE KILLING US,” the
radio journalist Marcela Ojeda tweeted
[[link removed]] at
the time. After that call to arms, a group of female journalists began
tweeting under the #NiUnaMenos hashtag, resulting in the first
of many marches
[[link removed]] that
brought tens of thousands of women to gather at the congressional
square in Buenos Aires.

The following year, Argentinian feminists held a mass strike
[[link removed]] in
response to the rape, murder and impalement of 16-year-old Lucía
Pérez in the coastal city of Mar del Plata.

It was after the 2015 #NiUnaMenos march that pro-choice campaigners
realised the fight against “femicide” could also encompass demands
for access to legal abortion.

They adopted a green scarf – worn as a bandana, head-scarf, or
around the wrist – as a symbol of their movement, a trend that
quickly spread to other Latin American countries, where green has come
to symbolise the broader fight for women’s rights.

That green scarf was an allusion to the Mothers of Plaza de Mayo
activists who wore white headscarves as they confronted Argentina’s
vicious 1976-83 dictatorship
[[link removed]] over
the disappearance of their children.

Pro-choice campaigners initially saw their hopes of change dashed in
August 2018 when the senate, under pressure from the Catholic
church, rejected a similar bill
[[link removed]].

Fernández’s election the following year
[[link removed]] brought
fresh hope, as he promised to back the push for change. “The
criminalisation of abortion has achieved nothing,” he said in
November after putting the legislation to congress.

Speaking outside congress on Wednesday, 46-year-old Julieta Cabrera
said: “Until the last moment I didn’t want to believe it, not
until the last vote was in, because last time, we got our hopes up.”
She said she had come out because “abortion is something I’ve
experienced firsthand. My generation and many others have been through
it.”

Opponents of the law, who had gathered nearby by a giant model foetus
that is their trademark, dispersed quickly after the result emerged,
with one man occasionally shouting the word “Murderers!” towards
the pro-choice side.

Karina Marolla, a 49-year-old opponent of the law, said: “What was
voted for today is the death penalty for the most innocent. Today in
Argentina there’s no law giving the death penalty to rapists or
murderers. So we’re feeling sad, to put it lightly.”

[Anti-abortion rights and other religious groups in Buenos Aires on
Tuesday.]
[[link removed]]

 Anti-abortion and other religious groups in Buenos Aires on Tuesday.
Photograph: Alejo Manuel Avila/Le Pictorium
Agency/ZUMA/REX/Shutterstock

Carino said the leftward political shift that brought Fernández to
power had undoubtedly boosted the pro-choice campaign after the
previous year’s setback. Among those who helped Fernández win
office were many young women who took part in the #NiUnaMenos protests
and were voting for the first time.

Carino said the real credit lay with Argentina’s indefatigable women
“who never stopped occupying the streets and the social networks –
not even against the backdrop of the pandemic – and kept up their
struggle, without haste but without rest”.

“If anything made the difference, it was this.”

*
[[link removed]]
*
[[link removed]]
*
* [[link removed]]

 

 

 

INTERPRET THE WORLD AND CHANGE IT

 

 

Submit via web [[link removed]]
Submit via email
Frequently asked questions [[link removed]]
Manage subscription [[link removed]]
Visit xxxxxx.org [[link removed]]

Twitter [[link removed]]

Facebook [[link removed]]

 




[link removed]

To unsubscribe, click the following link:
[link removed]