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The decrease home of Chile’s Congress took a step towards decriminalizing abortion most often Tuesday, voting to craft a regulation barring prosecution of girls who get abortions within the first 14 weeks of being pregnant.
The initiative, which is opposed by the federal government, nonetheless faces hurdles earlier than it will probably change into regulation. Whereas lawmakers within the decrease home voted 75-68 with two abstentions to debate it, particulars of a invoice must be agreed upon earlier than the matter then goes to the Senate
At the moment, abortion is allowed in Chile solely in circumstances of rape, medical circumstances that endanger a lady’s life or situations when a fetus wouldn’t have the ability to survive.
The vote by legislators got here the identical day that girls’s teams within the area had been staging demonstrations in opposition to abortion restrictions.
There are not any statistics on what number of clandestine abortions are carried out per 12 months in Chile. The Humanas Company, a ladies’s rights group, estimates there are between 60,000 and 70,000.
Decriminalization of abortion within the first 14 weeks of being pregnant would shield ladies from in search of the process in presumably unsafe circumstances, stated Chilean lawmakers who help the measure.
“Condemning a lady for merely having an abortion is immoral,” opposition deputy Andrea Parra stated.
Mónica Zalaquett, the minister of girls’s affairs, stated that “this authorities will all the time shield life, from its conception” and that “no lady in Chile is serving” jail time for having an abortion.
Chile holds normal elections Nov. 21 and can be within the strategy of drafting a brand new structure to switch the outdated military-era constitution.
Many international locations in heavy Catholic Latin America have restrictive abortion legal guidelines, although legalization efforts in some nations have gained momentum.
The undertaking to decriminalize abortion most often languished in Chile’s Congress for a number of years and was solely reactivated when an identical regulation was permitted in Argentina in December 2020.
This month, Mexico’s Supreme Court docket dominated it’s unconstitutional to punish abortion, unanimously annulling a number of provisions of a regulation from Coahuila — a state on the Texas border — that had made abortion a legal act.
The choice in Mexico got here quickly after a Texas regulation took impact prohibiting abortions as soon as medical professionals can detect cardiac exercise within the fetus.
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