Nicaragua votes to ban abortions
Nicaragua’s Congress has voted to approve a bill banning all abortions, including those that could save a mother’s life.
The bill has drawn protests from women’s rights groups, and the Managua-based Women’s Autonomous Movement has said it was prepared to seek an injunction to block the measure if it passed.
But the measure was supported by the leftist Sandinista National Liberation Front, whose presidential candidate Daniel Ortega is seeking not to alienate conservative voters ahead of the November 5 election.
If signed into law by President Enrique Bolanos, the measure would eliminate a century-old exception to Nicaragua’s abortion ban that permits the procedure if three doctors certify that the woman’s health is at risk.
Fifty-two politicians voted for the measure yesterday. Nine abstained and 29 others did not attend the legislative session.
Bolanos has proposed increasing prison sentences for illegal abortions - currently around six years – to 10 to 30 years for women who have the procedure as well as those who assist them.
But it was unclear whether he would sign the bill after politicians decided not to increase the penalties in the predominantly Roman Catholic country.
Congress approved the bill despite receiving a letter from diplomats from the European Union and representatives of the United Nations asking it to hold off on voting on the issue until after the election.
Nicaragua’s medical association also urged legislators to postpone the vote, saying the issue had become politicised.
Ortega, who was pro-choice as a young revolutionary, has said he has since become a devout Roman Catholic who now opposes abortion.
Ortega headed the socialist Sandinista government of the 1980s and had a contentious relationship with the Catholic church, but he has recently established warm ties with leading church figures in Nicaragua.
In 2003, Sandinista-backed women’s groups helped a nine-year-old Nicaraguan girl who had been raped in Costa Rica return to her homeland to get an abortion, outraging the Roman Catholic Church at the time.
Violeta Delgado, who helped the girl obtain the abortion at a Nicaragua clinic, accused Sandinista lawmakers of changing course to ensure Ortega wins the elections.
Congressman Wilfredo Navarro, of the ruling Liberal Constitutionalist Party, said the exception to Nicaragua’s ban has allowed women to break the law. Many women who didn’t want to have a baby convinced doctors to say an abortion was needed for health reasons, he said.
Apart from Cuba, which offers abortions on demand for the first 12 weeks of pregnancy, Latin America has some of the world’s most restrictive anti-abortion laws.
El Salvador and Chile also ban all types of abortions.
Most of the other countries in this heavily Roman Catholic region allow abortion when a woman’s life is in danger but deny it to pregnant victims of rape or incest, according to the Centre for Reproductive Rights, a New York-based advocacy group that supports abortion rights.
In May, Colombia’s constitutional court legalised abortion in cases where foetuses were severely malformed, the pregnancy was the result of a rape or incest or the mother’s life was in danger.
Some 85% of Nicaragua’s five million people are Catholics.
Around the world, more than a dozen countries have made it easier to get abortions in the past decade, and women from Mexico to Ireland have mounted court challenges to get access to the procedure.
