Chile abortion arrest: sick woman is reported to police after going to hospital
Source: Guardian
Chile abortion arrest: sick woman is reported to police after going to hospital
Country’s total ban on abortion back in spotlight after doctor reported patient, 25, to police on suspicion of using drug to terminate pregnancy
Jonathan Franklin in Santiago
Tuesday 24 March 2015 23.42 EDT
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A woman holds up a pro-choice banner in Santiago, Chile, as the government considers a bill to ease the country’s
complete ban on abortion. Photograph: Ivan Alvarado/Reuters
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A 25-year-old hospital patient has been arrested in Chile after a surgeon suspected the woman had deliberately induced an abortion.
The patient had entered the Carlos Cisterna public hospital on Sunday complaining of severe abdominal pain and vaginal bleeding. She was taken to surgery but when a doctor suspected the involvement of a prescription drug known as Misotrol – widely used for abortions in Latin America – he notified Chilean police.
Chile is one of only six countries in the world where abortion is illegal under any circumstances – even rape. The current government has pledged to change this.
The woman remained in medical care and under arrest on Tuesday, according to Patricio Toro, director of the hospital in the northern city of Calama. She was not being named.
Read more: http://www.theguardian.com/world/2015/mar/25/chile-abortion-arrest-sick-woman-held-after-going-to-hospital-for-help
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found that devout Catholics were 10-20 percentage points more pro-choice than atheists in the late 60s and the 70s
the Salvadoran students' union called it "preemptive genocide" (reducing the number of the poor--and preventing The Revolution from happening by reducing misery) and Honduras's 70s Communist Youth were the ones beating up any doctor who talked about contraception on the National University's campus and even cancelling demographics from the curriculum ("We've convinced them that to carry out such a program is to act against the nation. ... The Medical School will never allow a plan of North American penetration to be carried out in its name!"
Salvadoran editors (pre-Humanæ Vitæ) opined that Central America "should think of birth control only after it has twice the population of England or France. At one point he speaks of Central America's resources being sufficient for a population ten times its present size" and the Hondurans' belief 1970 was "If we would have had more people, El Salvador would not have dared to invade us" in 1969: 75% of intelligentsia and 60% of students in Honduras thought that a doubled or tripled population was needed to end poverty; Planned Parenthood's job was labeled as "assuring the domination of western civilization" by keeping foreigners in control of the Third World: the First World feared "that their prestige and power positions might be threatened if our countries grow too fast"; one French-educated Honduran atheist said that "A situation now favorable to the U.S. will no longer be so once Latin America triples its present population," and leftists were likelier to oppose family planning if irreligious (39% right was pro-planning vs. 29% left): 24% of the right denied that growth increased poverty, as opposed to 50% of the far left (Axel Mundigo)
in the 80s it was the decidedly un-religious (but very male-dominated) human-rights orgs opposing legalizing abortion way more than the Archdiocese in the newspapers, and the guerrilla movements called the Pill a "soft bullet" or "genocide before the fact" since less hunger meant less recruits
it's not that new either: 20s France was the only European country to see its population fall, so abortionists were outlawed and called national traitors there, too: many of Central America's intelligentsia were French-educated, often under M. Sauvy himself
