SANTIAGO DE CHILE, April 28, 2015 (LifeSiteNews.com) – Amidst the country’s debate to legalize ‘therapeutic’ abortion, a woman in Santiago accompanied by her 9-year-old son dubbed as ‘unviable’ during her pregnancy, publicly confronted two of the health officials who are pushing for the legalization to kill the unborn as they were exiting a work meeting held with the Health Commission.
“You have an unviable fetus here,” she said to the officials. “I want you to look at him, please. Look at what an unviable fetus means. This is a repeated medical error, children survive.”
“Your project doesn’t consider the defenselessness of women,” she continued. “You are only looking at one type of woman. And know that I am a leftist woman; this is not the vision of a right-winged, well-off woman. This is a child who survived.”
The boy, Etián Araya, was diagnosed with Proteus syndrome during his mother’s pregnancy. According to his mother, Nevenka Astudillo, in an interview with CNN Chile, her son was given no chance of survival by several medics. “This diagnostic was ratified seven times,” she said in the interview.
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Among the diagnostics, doctors also told Astudillo her child would be ‘retarded,’ ‘disabled,’ or would live for only 3 hours outside the womb.
Etián was born weighing over 12 pounds, and had to undergo immediate surgery to extract a tumor growing on the left side of his body. He has since had 18 more surgeries and according to Astudillo, “is mischievous like a normal child.”
“He goes to public school like the rest,” she said to CNN Chile. “He is not in a special school. He is a child with a normal intelligence, a happy child.”
So when Carmen Castillo, Chile’s health minister, and Claudia Pascual from SERNAM (Women’s National Service) started telling the boy to “calm down,” as his mother spoke to them, she responded by saying: “You are now telling him to calm down but you will kill them all with your project.”
According to AciPrensa, Castillo responded to Astudillo saying they’re looking to legalize abortion “around three specific situations,” when the health or life of the mother are at risk, the fetus is not viable, or in cases of rape. This has been in President Bachelet’s agenda ever since she took office and described abortion as being ‘essential.’
Astudillo is author of a book titled “Voices from the Womb,” in which she describes various cases of children who, like her son, were catalogued as ‘unviable’ and now lead regular lives.
“Thousands of Etiáns will not survive if therapeutic abortion is decriminalized,” she said in an interview with the Chilean pro-life association Nadie Sobra (No One is Expendable). “He is not a whim, the fight for life can never be a whim, it’s just an act of love,” she concluded in tears.
