HEALTH-URUGUAY: Three Votes Away from Legalisation of Abortion

By Diana Cariboni Reprint | | Print |

Diana Cariboni

MONTEVIDEO, May 5 2004 (IPS) - The Uruguayan Senate fell just three votes short of passing a law that would have legalised abortion. According to opinion polls, 63 percent of the population of this South American country is in favour of making abortion legal.

The social organisations that helped promote the initiative say they will take the issue to the scenario where the political parties did not want it to go: the campaign for the October general elections.

Thirteen legislators voted in favour of the bill and 17 voted against, in the session that began on Tuesday afternoon and ended five minutes after midnight.

”We are going to demand responses and alternatives from the parties to each issue included in the draft law which, because of them, was not passed,” activist Lilián Abracinskas told IPS.

She is a spokeswoman for the National Coordination of Social Organisations for the Defence of Reproductive Health, an umbrella group linking trade unions, social organisations, women’s groups, the youth branches of leftist parties, professionals and Protestant church groups.

Abracinskas said ”Abortions in risky conditions have become the main independent cause of maternal mortality,” which stood at 36.6 per 100,000 live births (the latest figure from the National Statistics Institute), up from 17.1 per 100,000 in 2000.

”Forty-seven percent of maternal deaths in the Pereira Rossell hospital (the country’s biggest maternity hospital) are due to unsafe abortions,” she added.

In 2001, the total number of maternal deaths in Uruguay was 19, up from nine in 2000. In 2002, five women died of complications arising from unsafe abortions.

The bill, which made it through the Chamber of Deputies in December 2002, would have made abortion legal in the first 12 weeks of pregnancy.

But it also would have made it obligatory for any pregnant woman wishing to abort to receive information and social and psychological assistance.

In addition, it would have made sex education mandatory in all schools, while providing for free family planning and reproductive health services and contraceptives.

Uruguay, which is located between Argentina and Brazil and was once known as the ”Switzerland of South America” due to its high standard of living, has been discussing legislative solutions to the problem of unsafe, clandestine abortions for nearly 20 years.

”It is extremely serious that one out of three maternal deaths between 1997 and 2001 were caused by complications arising from abortions practiced in risky conditions – a cause that is not only preventable but also virtually non-existent in countries where safe abortion services are available,” the Medical Union of Uruguay (SMU) said last week.

”The environment of inequality that surrounds this issue is shameful, insulting, immoral and unsustainable,” added the SMU, the doctors’ union.

In this country of 3.4 million, an estimated 33,000 abortions are practiced every year, compared to 55,000 births – a proportion of four abortions for every 10 pregnancies, according to the study ‘Condemnation, Tolerance and Denial: Abortion in Uruguay’ by the International Peace Research and Information Centre (CIIIP).

Abortion has thus turned into a birth control method, and it is illegal in name only, says the study.

But the high cost of a safe abortion – 500 to 600 dollars – in well-equipped clandestine clinics is out of the reach of poor women.

”Until this month, there were enough votes (to approve the law). I won’t even try to explain the legislators’ sudden change of heart,” Senator and physician Mónica Xavier, a member of the leftist Encuentro Progresista-Frente Amplio (EP-FA) coalition, which sponsored the law, told IPS.

The bill also had the support of public opinion. A telephone survey carried out Apr. 28-30 by the Equipos-Mori polling firm found the highest support ever for the legalisation of abortion.

Sixty-three percent of respondents said they would be in favour of a law that would provide for sex education and free access to birth control, and would permit abortion in the first three months of pregnancy.

Fifty-seven percent said the questions of sex education, access to contraceptives and the legalisation of abortion should be debated in the election campaign, and 61 percent said the political parties should clearly define their positions on these issues.

The proportions were similar to those found by a survey conducted in the last quarter of 2003 by Factum, another local polling firm.

”Human rights, including sexual and reproductive rights, are fundamental questions for numerous civil society organisations,” but ”the political parties have resisted including them on their agendas, and tend to underestimate them as political issues,” said Abracinskas.

The Roman Catholic Church was at the forefront of the campaign against the bill, and resorted to a veritable verbal artillery.

”No legislator who calls himself Christian can vote for this law,” Archbishop of Montevideo Nicolás Cotugno said in mid-April.

”What difference is there between an 18-year-old youngster who flies through the air, shot out of a train in Madrid by a dynamite explosion, and a human being at just two months of gestation that is in the mother’s uterus when they insert forceps and smash its head and then pull it out in pieces and throw it in a garbage can?” asked Cotugno, alluding to the Mar. 11 terrorist attacks on commuter trains in Spain.

The top leaders of all three of Uruguay’s main political parties are opposed to the decriminalisation of abortion.

However, the leftist EP-FA, the front-runner in the polls for the October elections, sponsored the bill, although it left its lawmakers free to vote according to their conscience. But only Senator Eleuterio Fernández Huidobro, a former Tupamaro guerrilla, voted against the bill.

Of the senators in the two traditional political forces, the National Party and the ruling Colorado Party, only one – Colorado Senator Julio Herrera – voted in favour of the bill.

While the debate was taking place Tuesday in the 30-member Senate, protests were held outside Congress both against and in favour of the bill. The civil society groups that defended it did so under the slogan ‘Sex education to prevent pregnancy; contraceptives to prevent abortions; legal abortions to prevent deaths’.

Abortion remains illegal in nearly all countries of Latin America and the Caribbean. But every year, more than four million abortions are practiced in the region, according to the United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA).

Worldwide, an estimated 20 million clandestine abortions are practiced annually, and some 78,000 women die as a result, says the U.N. agency.

In 1934, a law was passed in Uruguay that decriminalised abortion. But it was overturned in 1938 as the influence of conservative sectors grew.

Law 9,763, which dates to Jan. 24, 1938 and is still on the books, provides for a three to nine-month prison term for any woman found guilty of undergoing an abortion, and a six to 24-month term for anyone who helps a woman abort.