The “chainsaw” of Argentine President Javier Milei He has raised new obstacles to access to reproductive health and abortion, whose legalization in 2020 represented a historical milestone for feminist movements and that the lack of budget threatens to convert into dead letter.
Oenegés report lack of free drugs to abort and contraceptives. Also the dismantling of successful programs to prevent teenage pregnancies.
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“We are helpless, we don’t have the state tools we had before. This Government hits us above all to women, ”Patricia Luppi told AFP, one of the hundreds attending a preparatory feminist assembly of the March 8 march in Buenos Aires.
There it was called to “resist” the fall of programs such as the protection of victims of gender violence, to “prevent” the elimination of the aggravating penalty of femicide, in the Government Agenda, and to defend policies of sexual diversity.
“There is no economic issue, there is an ideological issueThey are against all the achievements of feminism, ”said Marta Alanis, a pioneer of the campaign for legal and free abortion.
“Feminism has already won the cultural battle to the right. They react against those achievements because we went quite far, ”he said.
Milei has defined the voluntary interruption of pregnancy as “a murder” and those who defend it as “promoters of the blood agenda and murder of abortion.”
– Chainsaw –
The Milei government made cuts in all areas of the State, with tens of thousands of layoffs that fragilized health care structures.
Milei has confronted with the feminist collective that managed to legalize abortion in Argentina.
This for the sake of the fiscal balance that the Government exhibits as its greatest achievement together with the containment of inflation, of 2.2% monthly in January.
And without a budget for 2025, in 2024 the previous year was extended despite the fact that inflation was 211% in 2023 and 118% the following year.
In this context, a report by the Oenegé Project Mira, which monitors compliance with the Abortion Law, reported that last year the national government did not distribute any treatment.
The provinces took over, but with “weak response capacity” in inputs, training and technical assistance.
The distribution of condoms was stopped and the teenage pregnancies prevention program was dismantled, which between 2017 and 2023 had resulted in a decrease in the 57% pregnancies rate in girls up to 14 years.
Natalia Gerhardi, co -director of the Act to Argentina’s abortion access network (Recaas), alerts that Women could stop attending public hospitals to request practice.
Access to free abortion “is at risk in 2025,” he concluded.
– “Much in danger” –
In Chivilcoy, A city of 90,000 inhabitants in the province of Buenos Aires, abortion medicines are given to droplets.
The Ministry of the Feminist Organization ‘La Bonfire’ receives up to 15 weekly petitions of misoprostol. But many women go empty -handed, told AFP Cecilia Robledo, counselor since 2014.
“In these almost 11 years we saw a lot of barriers and missing, but never such an atrocious cut“, said.
In neighboring cities it is added that the available doctors are conscientious objectors, something that allows the law, but that is one more barrier.
While until 2023 in the interviews they prevailed reasons for desire or life projects to request an abortion, “now they are mostly women without an affective network or with precarious jobs requesting the interruption because they cannot face it from the economic and social,” Robledo explained.
“It is terrible what this management is doing with all the advances in rights, there is much in danger,” he concluded.
Poverty climbed 11 points in the first six months of the government of Milei to 52.9%. Since then it was in descentaccording to private studies.
The economic crisis “always disproportionately affects women,” economist Mercedes D’Alessandro told AFP.
“They are the ones that suffer the most when there are budget cuts. When they have work, they earn less and carry unequal way with care tasks, ”he said.
