BUENOS AIRES, Feb 20 (NNN-EFE) — Several hundred people protested in Buenos Aires to demand once again, but for the first time this year, a law establishing legal abortion, a demand that feminist groups consider “irrepressible”.
After the year 2018 saw intense public debate in Argentina, when the Senate rejected a bill to legalize abortion by voting 38 to 31 against it, the National Campaign for Legal, Safe and Free Abortion ended their summer break and demanded once again that Congress approve the law which will be tabled again in the coming months.
Ornella Stefanazzi, a member of the campaign, told EFE that the group has already succeeded in the “social decriminalization” of the voluntary termination of pregnancies and stated that bringing the legalization into law “is an unstoppable demand”.
Even though she experienced the rejection of the bill with “strong dismay,” she believes that there are “great possibilities” that soon legal abortion “will be law, as it should be”.
“We are optimists because we are going to make it happen, the patriarchy is going to be thrown away and since it depends on our struggle and our resistance, we are optimists,” added Stefanazzi, one of the various speakers at the event.
Tuesday’s rally, which was also held in other cities like Cordoba, took place on the anniversary of the first demonstration held in 2018, a year of strong feminist mobilization which the campaign aims to maintain.
Agustina Viale, also a member of the campaign for the legalization of abortion, considered that it was the protests and the social debate that pushed Congress to even consider the bill, and she warned: “We are going to continue presenting it again and again until we make it law.”
The group first started their initiative 14 years ago, and on the seventh attempt obtained a majority for the legalization bill in the lower house of the Argentine National Congress in April 2018 but then was rejected by 38 votes to 31 by the Senate in August.
Viale accused the anti-abortionist supporters that day that “on the other side there was no celebration, there is nothing to celebrate because women are still dying,” and recalled that just a week later the death of a young woman, after a clandestine pregnancy termination, became public.
However, she is also confident that the legalization of abortion will take place sooner or later: “Society pushes, there is no turning back”. — NNN-EFE
