“There’s no money!” Milei
Four years after Argentina became the first big Latin American country to legalize abortion, women are finding it hard to access terminations due to President Javier Milei’s “chainsaw” economics and anti-feminist diatribes, critics say.
At a women’s sexual health NGO in the town of Chivilcoy, 160 kms west of Buenos Aires, abortion pills are handed out sparingly because of reduced state-sponsored supplies. Each week, about 15 women in Chivilcoy request them but some now leave empty-handed, according to Cecilia Robledo, a local councillor who runs the organization. In the 11 years that she has been advising women about unplanned pregnancies, Robledo said she has had to navigate “a lot of obstacles, but never such brutal cuts”.
Health centres and family planning clinics in several provinces have also reported shortages of abortion pills and condoms following drastic cuts to the national sexual health programme. Supplies fell nearly 65 percent in the 12 months to September 2024, official statistics show.
Milei, a fervent admirer of Donald Trump, has also cut funding for a programme credited with halving the number of teen pregnancies between 2017 and 2023, especially in the poorer provinces of Argentina’s northwest. Provincial governments were left to pick up the tab for the programme, despite their own funding from the central government being reduced. The result, according to the councillor, has been an increase in the number of women requesting repeat abortions.
Milei campaigned for the presidency with a chainsaw in hand to show his determination to slash public spending, has a stock response to complaints about budget cuts. “No hay plata (there’s no money),” he says. And he prides himself on taming inflation and turning Argentina’s first budget surplus in more than a decade last year. At whose expense, we might ask…
And of course he has also been vocal in his opposition to abortion. His government insists it has no plans to repeal the 2020 abortion law, and a bill to do so, proposed by a member of Milei’s party last year, received no backing. But as Lala Pasquinelli, a lawyer and feminist activist, pointed out, even if the law remains on the statute books, Argentines could lose the right to end a pregnancy “in practice” because of a lack of funding.
REDAAS, a network of health professionals and rights experts who support abortion rights and monitor access to abortion, have warned of growing disinformation and stigmatization of women who seek terminations, as well as the health professionals who perform them.
Robledo said the stigma was evident in the reasons women now cite for requesting abortions. Until 2023, most cited life choices, but now they put forward economic reasons, she said.
Activists say the scrapping of price controls on medicine is further squeezing women who increasingly have to pay out of pocket for abortion pills. “This government’s policies are hitting women the hardest,” said Patricia Luppi, one of hundreds of feminists who participated in organising the International Women’s Day march in Buenos Aires. Beyond reduced abortion access, feminists also reject government cuts to programmes to protect victims of gender violence, and plans to scrap stiffer jail terms for murders that qualified as femicides.
“This is not an economic issue, it’s an ideological issue,” activist Marta Alanis said. “They are against all the strides made by feminists.”
SOURCE: France24, 6 March 2025
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Dangerous mimicry by Argentina in withdrawing from WHO: Letter to the Editor
[Jumping forward to June 2025]… It seems Milei has joined the anti-science crusade in the US by announcing his decision to imitate Trump and withdraw from the World Health Organization!… This is dangerous mimicry. The question for us is how do we in the Caribbean insulate ourselves from this madness?… As Kipling would ask, how do we keep our heads when all about you are losing theirs and blaming it on you? This is not mere flag-waving. The net result will be measured in loss of life. And the irony is that the people doing this nonsense will claim they are acting to protect the sanctity of life.
Just four years ago, Argentina made abortion legal. Only three other countries in Latin America have made abortion on request legal in early pregnancy – Cuba (1965), Guyana (1995) and Uruguay (2012).
Milei tried to reverse that law and failed. So, by executive action he has restricted access to contraceptives and medication abortion pills (MA). Two years ago, more than 150,000 doses of MA pills were delivered. None has been available in 2025.
As in the US, there has been a surge in unwanted pregnancies and a surge in complications from unsafe abortions. Women die today and 18-20 years later we can expect a huge surge in violent crime.
What is truly infuriating is that we are denying women access to a major medical advance, medication abortion, precisely when Etienne-Emile Baulieu, who developed the drug, RU-486 (mifepristone) has died. He was a ripe 98 years old. About half of all abortions today are by medication.
In the arena of reproductive health, the hostility to science is inseparable from the desire to control women. This is misogyny on stilts.
SOURCE: Staebroek News, Letter to the Editor, by Fred Nunes, 4 June 2025