Buenos Aires: Argentina's President Alberto Fernandez who was sworn in as president in December, has said he will send a bill to legalise abortion to Congress within the next 10 days.
"Abortion happens, it's a fact," the president said in his first annual address to Congress, the BBC reported on Monday. He had also previously described abortion as "a matter of public health".
"A state should protect citizens in general and women in particular. And in the 21 st Century, every society needs to respect the individual choice of its members to decide freely about their bodies." If the bill is passed, Argentina will become the largest country in the region to legalise abortion, whereas in countries like El Salvador, Honduras, Nicaragua and Haiti abortion is completely banned.
In Argentina, abortion is allowed only in cases of rape, or if the mother's health is in danger. Cuba, Uruguay and Guyana are currently the only Latin American countries to permit abortion in the first weeks of pregnancy.
Fernandez also promised to introduce a programme to improve sex education.
A previous attempt to change the law in Argentina, where the population is overwhelmingly Roman Catholic, failed.
In 2018, a bill to legalise abortion within the first 14 weeks of pregnancy was narrowly approved by Congress, but was later rejected by the country's Senate.
The debate surrounding abortion in Argentina was reignited in February last year, when an 11-year-old rape victim gave birth by C-section, she was raped by her grandmother's 65-year-old partner, had requested an abortion but the procedure was repeatedly delayed over questions about the identity of her guardian.
In El Salvador, dozens of women have been imprisoned for the deaths of their fetuses in cases where they say they suffered miscarriages or stillbirths.Evelyn Hernandez, a Salvadorean teenager, was raped by a gang member and then jailed for 30 years for what her supporters say was a miscarriage. Opponents say she killed her child. Last year, she was released pending a retrial.
Source: IANS
