In 2024, Argentine President Javier Milei took to the stage at Davos and condemned the “bloody abortion agenda” of the elites to their faces. Four years before, despite a herculean effort by the country’s “Blue Wave” pro-life movement, Argentina legalized abortion. In 2018, abortion legalization had been defeated; two years later, a handful of senators were pressured into switching their votes by leftist President Alberto Fernández.
Milei ran for president on a pro-life platform, indicating his willingness to consider a referendum to repeal legal abortion (at one point, he said abortion supporters were “brainwashed by a homicidal policy). In the meantime, he has consistently condemned abortion – and now the global abortion movement is condemning him, ludicrously insisting that, as Amnesty International put it recently, that Argentina is being used as a “testing ground” for “stripping back abortion rights internationally.”
As is so often the case with abortion activists, this is the precise opposite of the truth. Abortion activists believed that their 2020 victory in Argentina would lead to a “Green Wave” – the color of their movement – across the continent, with the pro-life regimes of other countries falling like dominos. Instead, nations like Honduras passed “Shield Against Abortion” laws to prevent international pressure and political shenanigans from accomplishing the same feat there.
In short, Argentina was a pro-life country that served as the “testing ground” for abortion activists, not the other way around. A recent report in the Guardian, however, claims otherwise. According to Guardian journalist Harriet Barber:
Before the inauguration of President Javier Milei in December 2023, the state bought abortion pills, which were then distributed for free through the public health system. In 2023, the state supplied more than 166,000 doses of misoprostol and a joint mifepristone-misoprostol therapy known as a combipack, according to data collected by Amnesty. But it delivered none last year, with responsibility quietly handed over to the country’s 23 provinces.
Amnesty said the switch was “hindering access to abortion services for women”, and that more than half of the provinces reported a shortage of misoprostol, and almost all reported shortages of mifepristone and combipack. According to the Argentine Network for Access to Safe Abortion, the change is having the biggest impact in provinces where politicians are anti-abortion or have fewer economic resources.
Project Mirar, an initiative that monitors implementation of the abortion law, said provinces had struggled to negotiate prices as effectively as the state, and that some did not have the budget to buy the drugs. One report found that in some cases women had been forced to buy the medication themselves, which it said could cost about $160 (£120).
Now, Amnesty International is warning that Milei’s “far-right government” is implementing the American “Project 2025.” As Argentine Amnesty International director Mariela Belski stated, “Argentina has been used as a testing ground for several of the policies featured in the Heritage Foundation’s 2025 plan … It is part of a global backlash that seeks to dismantle hard-won gains secured by women. It is also happening under Donald Trump’s leadership in the United States and in countries such as Hungary.”
Of course, this ignores the fact that Milei’s opposition to abortion is entirely his own – and that the Argentine president is, in fact, more pro-life than his American counterpart. Milei is a pro-life libertarian, and upon taking office promptly “closed the ministry of women, genders and diversity … and drastically cut funding for contraceptives.” As the Guardian noted, he also told high school students that he views abortion as “aggravated murder.”
While Milei has yet to initiate a referendum, there are indications that pro-life politicians have the abortion industry in their crosshairs. As Barber noted:
In February 2024, a small group of legislators from Milei’s La Libertad Avanza party went further still, filing a bill in congress to repeal the landmark 2020 abortion law. The bill was quickly withdrawn, but in December a high-ranking member of the government said that a push to repeal or change the law could go ahead this year…Milei’s anti-abortion rhetoric has also prompted growing numbers of doctors in Argentina to refuse to carry out terminations, according to medical professionals across the country.
Javier Milei has stated, from the outset of his run for office, that abortion is murder. He did not derive that view from Project 2025; or is he part of some international campaign to ban abortion (although he would no doubt wholeheartedly support such an effort). He is simply a patriotic Argentine, with the support of millions of his countrymen and women, who despise what the international abortion movement has done to their country – and wish to stop the destruction of the youngest and most vulnerable members of their nation.
