Argentina

About ten kilometers south of San Salvador de Jujuy is Alto Comedero, one of the poorest neighborhoods in the area. There is a state school of mixed secondary level, attended by less than 200 students. Today, 30 of the girls are pregnant. They are aged 12-19 years old. We asked the directors of a number of schools about this issue. Many did not want to answer, perhaps because they feel guilty that this is happening. … Continued

More than 3,700 people have submitted apostasy requests to the Argentinian synod in protest against the Church’s heavy-handed anti-abortion campaign during the debate in the Senate, according to César Rosenstein, a lawyer and founding member of the Argentinian Coalition for a Lay State. “Apostasy is an important symbolic and political act,” said Rosenstein, who said that visits to the group’s website had shot up since the vote from 100 daily unique users to around 40,000 … Continued

Two women have died in Buenos Aires province since the Senate vote on 8 August. One report has just arrived of a woman who had five children, as we go to press, with no other details. The other was reported on 14 August – a 34-year-old woman who had two children. She had been admitted to Manuel Belgrano Hospital the night before in poor condition, with a stalk of parsley in her cervix. Doctors carried … Continued

The Argentinian abortion reform, closely followed in the entire Latin American region, is extremely relevant, first and most obviously, from the perspective of equality and rights protection… [But it] is relevant also from a perspective attentive to the texture of the political and legal interactions on display.

The press release is available in PDF here  Argentina’s Senate voted last night – after a 15-hour “debate”, during which the room was mostly empty of Senators – to reject a bill on abortion passed by the House of Deputies in June. The tone and level of engagement in the two houses of the congress could not have been more different. The Deputies listened to each other, they were passionate, they seemed more open. The … Continued