ARGENTINA Doctors protest legal abortion ahead of vote
BUENOS AIRES — A campaign to expand legal abortions in the homeland of Pope Francis is bitterly dividing Argentines — and increasingly even the profession that would be asked to carry them out.
Hundreds of physicians have staged antiabortion protests as an abortion rights bill moves toward a vote in the Senate next week. Some have demonstrated while carrying fetus-shaped dolls and waving signs saying: “I’m a doctor, not a murderer.” At one recent protest, they laid white medical coats on the ground outside the presidential palace.
While the Doctors for Life activist group claims about 1,000 members — only a small fraction of the country’s physicians — its protests are feeding a debate in the profession as a whole about the move to legalize elective abortions in the first 14 weeks of pregnancy.
Leaders of the prestigious Argentina Medical Society have endorsed the bill, which has already passed the lower house of Congress. They said it would help reduce deaths among the estimated 400,000 to 500,000 women who now receive clandestine abortions each year.
But the equally august Academy of Medicine vehemently rejects the legislation. The academy issued a statement that human life begins at conception and “to destroy a human embryo means impeding the birth of a human being.”
“Nothing good can come when society chooses death as a solution,” it said.
An association of medical birth control specialists issued a strong statement in favor of the proposed law. Officials at about 300 private hospitals and medical facilities have denounced it.
“The defense of life is at the very foundation of our institution,” said Ernesto Beruti, chief of obstetrics at the Austral University Hospital, which is linked to the conservative Catholic Opus Dei movement. “We see ever more doctors joining” the protests.
Argentina now allows abortion only in cases of rape or risks to a woman’s health. But advocates say doctors and judges often continue to block legal abortions. Illegal abortions can lead to four years in prison for the woman and doctor alike.
The measure only narrowly passed in the Chamber of Deputies on June 14 after a long campaign by hundreds of feminist and human rights groups. Its advance appears to have galvanized opponents, religious and otherwise, to mobilize public protests ahead of a Senate vote tentatively set for Aug. 8. President Mauricio Macri has said he will sign the measure if it passes, despite opposing abortion.
Pope Francis this year denounced abortion as the “white glove” equivalent of the Nazi-era eugenics program and urged families “to accept the children that God gives them.”
But polls indicate most Argentines are in favor of broader legalization, which also has the support of local and international human rights groups, including Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International.