Bill to ease Chile's blanket abortion ban clears lower house.
| Autor | Witte-Lebhar, Benjamin |
Chilean lawmakers took a major step last month toward scaling back the country's all-out prohibition of abortion, voting 66-44 in the Chamber of Deputies to allow the practice in three specific circumstances: when a pregnancy puts the mother's life at risk, is the result of rape, or when the fetus is deemed nonviable, meaning it is unlikely to survive.
The decision, on March 17, followed a year of deliberations that culminated in a raucous debate, the day before, on the congressional floor. While legislators on the left called the government-backed initiative a crucial and long-overdue step on behalf of women's rights, conservative opposition deputies attacked it as a moral affront. "It is so permissive, so general, that's it is obviously a prelude to legalizing eugenics," said Deputy Gustavo Hasbun of the hard-right Union Democrata Independiente (UDI).
Chile's unusual and, until now, unyielding stance on abortion dates back to the waning days of the dictatorship of Gen. Augusto Pinochet (1973-1990). The South American nation is one of just a handful of countries in the world to completely outlaw the practice, even in cases of rape or incest, or to save the mother's life. In Latin America, El Salvador, Nicaragua, Haiti, Honduras and the Dominican Republic also have blanket abortion bans (NotiCen, Feb. 19, 2015).
The vote in the Chamber of Deputies, the lower house of the Chilean Congress, represents a significant, albeit partial, victory for the administration of embattled President Michelle Bachelet, who still needs to get the measure through the Senate. "It's a very important first step," Health Minster Carmen Castillo told reporters. "It establishes clear rules of the game."
Bachelet and her allies in the broad Nueva Mayoria coalition prevailed despite a handful of nay votes by members of the Partido Democrata Cristiano (PDC), the governing bloc's most conservative faction. The dissenting PDC deputies sided with members of the rightist Chile Vamos coalition, which includes the UDI, Renovacion Nacional (RN), Evolucion Politica and Partido Regionalista Independiente (PRI) parties.
Bachelet, a trained pediatrician and the country's first female head of state, formally proposed the new rules in January 2015, just weeks before bombshell revelations in the press implicated her son and daughter-in-law in a damaging real estate scandal (NotiSur, Feb. 13, 2015). Fallout from that and a number of other corruption-related cases, some linked to...
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