BUENOS AIRES — Every week, the Sexual and Reproductive Health program of Argentina’s Health Ministry receives an average of two inquiries about abortions from abroad. These are mainly people from Brazil, Paraguay and Chile, who ask where they can access the procedure that became legal in the country in 2020, which is guaranteed in both the public and private systems, for both Argentine and foreign women.
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But under Argentine President Javier Milei’s far-right government, this access could be compromised. Since his presidential campaign, Milei has been attacking the Voluntary Interruption of Pregnancy (IVE) Law, which authorizes any pregnant person to have an abortion up to the 14th week of pregnancy. When he took office, the country’s Health Ministry halted tenders that were underway to expand purchases of supplies to carry out legal abortions. Supplies have already begun to run out in some provinces.
In the city of Córdoba, located in central Argentina, the second largest in the country in terms of population, with 1.5 million inhabitants and one of the richest, there is no longer any misoprostol or mifepristone, medicines used for the safe termination of pregnancy. These drugs are in short supply at the municipality’s central pharmacy, according to Ana Morillo, a social worker who is part of the local government’s Comprehensive Sexual Health Commission.
Morillo is also part of the interdisciplinary team that guarantees abortion access in a health center located in the north of the district. In total, there are around 100 health centers in the area, 80 of which provide abortions. “They [the government] haven’t told us if they’re going to buy it or not when it’s all over for good,” she said.
Other provinces also fear that they will soon run out of supplies. “We’re receiving inquiries from pregnant women asking if there are still abortions. It’s a threat to the implementation of the law that people question whether or not it’s a right,” said a psychologist, a member of an abortion team at a health center in the suburb of Buenos Aires, the largest in the country, who spoke on condition of anonymity.
Movements gain momentum
Anti-abortion movements are gaining momentum in various parts of Argentina. In San Miguel, about 40 kilometers from the capital Buenos Aires, pregnant women are bombarded with information and videos showing dismembered fetuses in supposedly simulated legal abortions.
This happened to Erica*, 29, who is a few weeks pregnant. She was lured to a supposed NGO where she would receive counseling. “They said I would regret it, that women who have abortions regret it,” says Erica, who can’t remember the name of the organization or the people who approached her.
Erica is the mother of two young children — the youngest is 15 months old — and doesn’t want to have another child, especially in the context of such a serious economic crisis that is deepening in Argentina. She currently has no job and lives in a poor neighborhood in San Miguel, one of the few districts in the country that has been declared “Pro-Life” by the local government and does not comply with the IVE law.
Public agents even go from house to house to convince people not to have an abortion.
She says they sent her a WhatsApp leaflet saying “let the baby be born” and videos, one of which is an animation of a fetus being dismembered, with tweezers inserted through the woman’s vulva. The sequence is brutal. The narration says: “Then they assemble it like a jigsaw puzzle outside the mother’s womb to make sure it has all the parts and that nothing is left inside, otherwise serious infections can occur.” In another video, a gynecologist talks about supposed life-threatening infections when aborting with pills.
Pregnant women seeking legal abortions in San Miguel are targeted when they go to health centers and approached with misleading messages on social media. Public agents even go from house to house to convince people not to have an abortion.
“They go out with a truck with an ultrasound and go from house to house in the poorest neighborhoods of the district and do an ultrasound so that they can hear the fetus’ heartbeat to create a bond. They have them recorded in digital registers. The health workers pride themselves on having ‘ears’ in the neighborhoods to identify them,” says a researcher from the Transatlantic Feminist Network in response to anti-rights movements, made up of experts from Europe and Latin America, based in Germany. Erica was able to get a legal abortion at a public hospital in another municipality.
A national campaign
The ideologue of San Miguel’s anti-abortion push is Pablo de la Torre, a pediatrician and father of seven, linked to the ultraconservative Catholic group Opus Dei, fervent opponents of women’s right to decide over their bodies. The brother of the former mayor of San Miguel, he has taken over the National Secretariat for Children and the Family in the Ministry of Human Capital in Milei’s government. And he intends to extend San Miguel’s anti-abortion strategy to the whole country — based on the harassment and persecution of women, especially those who live in poverty.
On March 23, de la Torre took part in the 9th March for Life in Buenos Aires — a demonstration held in commemoration of the “Day of the Unborn Child,” which was established in 1998 in Argentina by a decree issued by then president Carlos Menem. As part of the celebration this year, the vice-president and president of the Senate, Victoria Villarruel, who is also a fervent opponent of abortion rights, ordered the balconies of the Legislative Palace to be lit up in light blue — the color of the anti-abortion front in Argentina.
The Ministry of Human Capital posted a video on social media showing fetal ultrasounds and pregnant women, with the caption “pregnant women carry the future of the Homeland in their wombs.” That day, Milei shared on his Instagram stories a leaflet with images of an embryo between two hands and the phrase: “245,000 Argentinians lost their lives because of the Abortion Law”.
Rights under attack
According to official data, in the first two years of implementation of the IVE law, which was approved in December 2020, the number of state health centers and hospitals that began offering the service doubled across the country.
Official statistics show that between January 2021 and October 2023, 245,015 safe and legal abortions were guaranteed in Argentina in public health institutions alone. Since the practice has been legal, maternal deaths have decreased: in 2018, 19 women died from abortion; in 2019, 18; in 2020, 15; in 2021, 9 and in 2022, 8.
While attacks against the IVE Law are gaining momentum under the Milei government, they actually began as soon as the law was passed. Since December 2020, anti-rights groups have filed more than 30 lawsuits to declare it unconstitutional. Most have been rejected. But three have reached the Supreme Court.
Milei has repeatedly stated that he considers abortion to be “aggravated murder.”
One of them was sponsored by lawyer Rodolfo Barra, a well-known jurist and fervent opponent of abortion rights. Barra is now also part of Milei’s government: He is the head of the state’s lawyers and has already expressed his desire to repeal the IVE Law.
Since taking office on Dec. 10, 2023, Milei has taken it upon himself to repeatedly express his firm opposition to the IVE law in different environments. He has repeatedly stated that he considers abortion to be “aggravated murder” because of the family bond. During the campaign, Milei said that, if elected, he would “hold a plebiscite” on the IVE Law with the intention of repealing it, although the Argentine Constitution does not provide for the possibility of holding a popular consultation on criminal matters.
At the beginning of February this year, and just a few days before Milei visited Pope Francis at the Vatican, a member of parliament from La Libertad Avanza, the libertarian party, presented a bill to repeal the IVE Law. The initiative goes further and aims to modify the Penal Code in relation to legal abortions that have existed in the country since 1921, removing this right from girls, women and people who are carrying a pregnancy who face a forced pregnancy resulting from rape or sexual abuse. But, curiously, Milei ended up disallowing the initiative by clarifying that it was not a government proposal.
Contempt for women
In any case, the president’s attacks on the IVE law are constant. And not only is the right to abortion a persistent target of the discourse, but also feminist activism and the achievements of expanding rights for women and diversities in recent years.
In the first hundred days of his government, Milei eliminated the Ministry of Women, Gender and Diversity and transformed it into a sub-secretariat within the Ministry of Human Capital, that he renamed Social Development; he cut spending on public policies that aim to reduce gender inequality by 33% — this adjustment was stronger than that suffered by the total national budget, which was around 24%. He also announced a ban on inclusive language in public administration.
On March 8, Karina Milei, the president’s sister and secretary general of the presidency, whom he calls “The Boss,” renamed the Salón de las Mujeres (Women’s Hall), where paintings of historical figures and pioneers from different eras were displayed, to Salón de los Próceres (Heroes’ Hall) — without any women.
After all, the presidential spokesman argued when justifying the measure, the former name was “discriminating against men.” This announcement was made while feminist movements were mobilizing for the first International Women’s Day march under the current government.
Foreigners under attack
The persecution of legal abortion threatens the rights of Argentinian women as well as those of pregnant foreigners who come to the country to have a safe procedure. In an Emergency Care Unit in a suburb on the outskirts of La Plata, the capital of Buenos Aires province, a woman tried to infiltrate a counseling session for four women who had gone to get an abortion.
“I came to inform myself. I’m a citizen,” said the woman, who was not registered and identified herself as Débora. This happened on March 5. She had a hidden cell phone with which she intended to film the session. The moment was very tense. They managed to throw her out.
“The scenarios are bleak with this far-right government because of their openly misogynist narratives.”
“We later learned that she had been outside the health unit asking questions of the girls who were there to have an abortion and suggesting alternatives other than terminating the pregnancy,” one of the health workers who witnessed the scene told Agência Pública. Two days later, the same woman returned, violently, to try to enter the health unit again. Screaming, she demanded to be allowed to stay. Finally, the care unit’s director and another doctor had to intervene and managed to get her to leave.
A few kilometers away, the San Martín Hospital in the city of La Plata published an institutional video on Instagram on March 8 in which female health workers and workers from other sectors are seen holding placards that say “Not one right less.” In the background, there is a green mural, with white letters highlighting the caption: “Voluntary, legal abortion in Buenos Aires.” Shortly after it was posted on the social network, the violent comments began. This had never happened to them before, says Mercedes Contreras, coordinator of the hospital’s interdisciplinary abortion team.
Solidarity in face of hatred
In Tucumán, the country’s smallest province, in the north of Argentina, the justice system is investigating an anonymous threat that a doctor who performs abortions in the public sector received at her home at the end of February. The doctor says this is the first time she has received threats.
In the country where the fight to get abortion legalized was massive and lasted for years, until the law was finally approved in 2020, these are still isolated scenes, but they are new.
“The scenarios are bleak with this far-right government because their openly misogynist narratives that validate contempt for women and diversity are compounded by the hopelessness of an economic plan tailor-made for a select few. They need pregnancies that guarantee cheap labor: child mothers, obstacles to abortion, starving caregivers, lack of funding for contraceptive policies and women without options is what they want,” says feminist lawyer Soledad Deza, from the NGO Mujeres x Mujeres, in Tucumán.
Faced with a very bleak outlook, she is betting on hope and adds: “We will invoke other forms of solidarity in the face of the hatred of the libertarians because we know that the happiest days were, are and will be feminist.”
