On Thursday, Argentina’s lower house of congress will vote on an abortion legalization bill sponsored by President Alberto Fernández, who holds a majority in the lower house. Despite a massive pro-life pushback in 2018 that defeated similar legislation, the government is hopeful that the senate will vote the bill into law next week. The new law would allow abortion up until fourteen weeks of pregnancy and beyond that point in cases of rape (abortion in those cases is already legal in Argentina.) This is the ninth attempt to legalize abortion in one of Latin America’s largest countries.
The pro-life movement, which launched the “Blue Wave” across the continent in 2018 in response to the symbolic green of the pro-abortion crowd, has been pushing back relentlessly for two years. Camila Duro, a 26-year-old pro-life leader who works for Frente Joven, an organization which “seeks to reduce maternal and infant mortality by addressing its main causes, providing support to women with pregnancies at risk and their children,” told me that it has been a stressful time. Pro-lifers are meeting with pro-life congressmen in order to persuade the undecided politicians to abstain from voting.
