(LifeSiteNews) — The abortion wars in Argentina are ongoing, and Hollywood is doing its part. Belén, a 2025 drama about a young woman falsely imprisoned for providing an illegal abortion, lionizes the rise of the Argentine abortion movement, and makes it clear that those who oppose abortions are villains. Predictably, it has been nominated for an Oscar.
Javier Milei, the eccentric libertarian who assumed the presidency of Argentina in December 2023, ran on a staunchly pro-life platform. During his campaign, he promised to consider a plebiscite to repeal Argentina’s abortion law, which passed narrowly in December 2020 after previously being defeated. Pro-life leaders expressed hope that his presidency would lead to concrete action on abortion, especially considering his clearly articulated stance on the sanctity of life.
“It is true that women have the right to their own bodies,” Milei said in an interview in 2023. “But the child in a woman’s body is not her body. That child is not her body. That makes abortion a murder, enabled and aggravated by a power imbalance against a child that has no way to defend itself. Beyond that, there is a matter of mathematics. Life is a continuum with two quantum leaps – birth, and death. Any interruption in the interim is murder.”
At the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, the following year, Milei took the stage to condemn the “bloody abortion agenda” of the elites. Abortion groups pinpointed him as one of the anti-abortion populist leaders to watch. Milei’s first term ends next year, and his economic successes have been significant—historian Niall Ferguson has referred to the rebounding Argentine economy as “Milei’s Manmade Miracle.” Milei has also been testing the waters on abortion. As the pro-abortion publication Health Policy noted:
Very quickly, his administration set out to dismantle reproductive rights programmes. In February 2024, a representative from Milei’s party, Liberty Advances (LLA, from its Spanish acronym), introduced a bill to repeal the 2020 abortion law. It re-criminalized abortion for both the practitioner and the pregnant woman, with no exception for rape. Faced with public outrage, the Bill was quickly withdrawn. Abortion is not a priority for now, said Vice-President Victoria Villaruel, a conservative Catholic.
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Instead, Milei has opted to wage a stealth war on Argentina’s abortion industry. He halted the national distribution of abortion pills, canceling the planned distribution of over 100,000 doses and reducing it to zero. To the fury of abortion activists, he also eliminated the Ministry of Women, Genders, and Diversity entirely. The Ministry of Health froze training and technical assistance for abortion as well. According to Health Policy:
The safe abortion programme took a major hit. In 2024, the federal Ministry of Health (MoH) abruptly stopped distributing pregnancy tests, medicines and supplies for abortion care to the provinces, including 106,000 units of the medical abortion pills, misoprostol and mifepristone, scheduled for delivery. Suddenly, each province, with varying levels of skills and budgets for procurement, had to buy its own supplies. The big discounts for pooled national procurement were lost.
By late 2024, half the provinces faced shortages of misoprostol, and nearly all had run out of mifepristone and combipacks of the two drugs that are used for medical abortions, according to Amnesty International in its 2025 report “It’s about you too: Defending access to abortion amid the rollback of public policies”.
On the ground, this has meant many barriers to abortion, with those seeking abortion having to pay themselves—Amnesty International claims that “barriers to access abortion nearly tripled in 2024” compared to the previous year, with delays becoming the norm in many areas and Centers for Vulnerable Maternities (crisis pregnancy centers) working in public hospitals to reach women with pro-life counseling.
Accurate information is difficult to come by, but abortion groups claim that these barriers likely account for the drop in abortion rates from around 107,500 in 2023 to 79,186 in 2024. The Guttmacher Institute (Planned Parenthood’s research arm) also noted that many medical professionals in Argentina refuse to participate in abortions, which also contributes to difficulties with “access.”
Meanwhile, Milei has accrued more pro-life reinforcements. “In October, Milie’s LLA won a key mid-term legislative election with nearly 41% of the vote (31% of the opposition, 32% abstention),” Health Policy noted. “Among the LLA’s elected lawmakers are six evangelical Christians, chief among them new senator Nadia Marquez, a lawyer and pastor who has called abortion ‘the largest genocide in history.’ Marquez campaigned against the law’s approval and has vowed to get it repealed.”
With nearly two years left, there is much Milei can still do. Abortion activists are very concerned about that fact—and pro-lifers should be encouraged.
