Argentina Decriminalises Abortion as Catholic Church Influence Wanes.

Celebration in Argentina as the Senate decriminalised abortions. Abortion had previously only been legal in cases of pregnancy due to rape or where there was a serious health risk to the mother.

Reuters

Argentina legalises abortion in landmark vote | The Independent

There was near euphoria in Argentine women's groups as, in yet another rejection if the Catholic Church and its teaching, Argentina yesterday became the first Latin American country to decriminalise abortion.

As with formerly devoutly Catholic Ireland, this is another milestone on the road to complete independence from the former dominance of the Catholic Church as secular morality develops and moves on, leaving a fossilised Church with its morality based on Medieval superstition behind. Instrumental in this reassessment and rejection of the moral leadership of the Catholic Church has, of course, been the tsunami of child sexual abuse scandals and exposure of the systematic facilitation and coverup by Catholic clerics of these abuses, often with the complicity and participation in the abuses by bishops and cardinals.

The vote of 38:29 in the Senate came after a prolonged campaign by women's groups. The new legislation, which had been vigorously opposed by the Catholic Church, allows a woman to have a termination up to the 14^th week of pregnancy. The Catholic Church is wedded to policies which are designed to maintain the poverty and poor educational standards of most Catholic third-world and emerging economies by ensuring women are never freed from the shackles of repeated pregnancies, large families and exclusion from economic activity and financial independence that would free them from dependent on their husbands, that access to abortion and family planning would give them.

Pope Francis. Likened an aborted foetus to Jesus.

The new legislation was introduced by the Argentine president, Alberto Fernandez, who said, more than 38,000 women are forced to go to hospital each year as a result of illegal terminations going wrong, and more than 3,000 have died since 1983. Not surprisingly there was an attempted intervention by Argentine-born Pope Francis who attempted to equate Jesus to an aborted foetus with:

The Son of God was born an outcast, in order to tell us that every outcast is a child of God. He came into the world as each child comes into the world, weak and vulnerable, so that we can learn to accept our weaknesses with tender love.

A recent report found that over 7,000 girls between 10 and 14 gave birth in Argentina between 2016 and 2018, often as a result of rape. President Fernandez came to power in December 2019 on policies which included a pledge to introduce legislation to decriminalise abortion.

Campaigners in the region are now hopeful that other Latin American countries will follow Argentina's lead and decriminalise abortions.

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