August 6, 2015 (HLI) — After many hours of deliberation, Chile’s Commission of Health voted eight to five Tuesday night to prepare a legislative bill that will decriminalize abortion when the mother’s health is at risk, fetal malformation, and rape.
The Commission, a unit of the Chilean lower house of Congress, should have a draft of the proposed bill by August 28, when it will be submitted to the Chamber of Deputies for a final vote on September 8. Among the measures that are supposed to be included in the legislative bill draft will be a provision to allow medical professionals to refuse to participate in abortions, and another that would impose a mandatory waiting period and counseling for mothers who request an abortion.
In addition to the thirteen members of the Health Commission who heatedly debated the abortion decriminalization measure, also present at that meeting were five cabinet members of President Michelle Bachelet, indicating her keen interest in the proceedings. She had, after all, made a campaign promise to liberalize abortion law in Chile.
The pressure put on the Health Commission was intense: It received testimonies from sixty-eight government, civil society, and religious organizations in Chile on the issue during a five-month period. Among the submissions was one from a group of female law professors from the School of Law of the Pontifical Catholic University of Chile, who testified against the abortion measure. On the Sunday before the Commission’s decision, the edition of the major newspaper El Mercurio carried an inserted two-page insert condemning the proposal from the Chile Conference of Catholic Bishops. Moreover, there was a March for Life held in Santiago on Monday, the day before the vote, with banners that read Do not kill Chile and Chile says Yes to Life.
Representative Juan Castro, a member of the Socialist Party and president of the Commission of Health of the Chamber of Deputies, stated soon after the vote: “What we have done is to restore the right of women to choose and to decide, when faced with insuperable circumstances.” The previous day he had responded to the bishops’ statement against the bill with a characteristic attack on the Church: “We cannot allow for conservative sectors in society to turn this matter into a Holy War.”
Mario Rojas, HLI regional director for Latin America, responded to Representative Castro: ‘The supporters of this abortion bill may try to intimidate and silence the Catholic Church clergy and laity who have raised their voices for the unborn children in Chile. We have experienced this before many times. So once again, we respond: We were born ready for this battle for life and we will not stop.”
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Representative Gustavo Hasbún, a member of the Independent Democratic Union Party, led the opposition to the abortion measure in the Commission. After the vote he told the media that, if the abortion legislative bill is approved in September the five legislators who opposed the measure will file a complaint before the Constitutional Court of Chile, asserting the inherent unconstitutionality of the abortion bill:
Today Chile lost. Chile has been deceived. The three exceptions used to decriminalize abortion are unsustainable in law and medicine. In the cases of danger to the life of a mother during a pregnancy, the doctor must do everything possible to save both lives without deliberately killing the child; there is no such thing as therapeutic abortion. In the cases of fetal malformation, this would be a eugenics abortion. And in the cases of rape, psychologists have found that abortion does not solve the emotional suffering brought about the rape.
Reprinted with permission from Human Life International.