Western feminists seek to impose their abortion views on native peoples.
The great blindness of progressives is that they think everyone wants to think like them.
Take abortion. There’s a to-do going on in Latin America over abortion at the moment — a periodic occurrence, since Latin America has some of the most restrictive abortion laws in the Western world, and feminists hate that.
The present cause is the Zika virus, a mosquito-borne malady plaguing Central and much of South America. As epidemic diseases go, it’s mild; the Centers for Disease Control notes that cases requiring hospitalization are uncommon. However, a report of increases in microcephaly — abnormal smallness of the head, a congenital birth defect — among babies born in Zika-stricken areas has officials, and women, in a panic.
A causal link has not been confirmed, but the World Health Organization “strongly suspects” one, and the governments of Colombia and El Salvador have even advised couples to delay becoming pregnant.
So, of course, abortion proponents are using the disease to push for relaxing the abortion laws to allow women to rid themselves of their shrunken-headed “burdens.”
A few sample headlines should suffice: “How Anti-Abortion Laws in the Americas Are Fuelling the Zika Virus Epidemic” (The Independent); “If Women with Zika Risk Shouldn’t Get Pregnant, They Need Abortion Access” (The Guardian); “The Abortion Rights Dystopia Brought On by the Zika Crisis” (the always overwrought Jezebel).
Why abortion is the only solution for these women is something the authors of the above don’t care to mention; only that it obviously is, and aren’t you for “human rights” (a formulation that makes one wonder what those things in the womb are; glockenspiels?). They also are firmly dedicated to the proposition that Latin America is basically an abortion hellscape, a Hieronymus Bosch painting come to life, plus a few palm trees.
It’s an odd thing, though, this equatorial land of purported maternal misery: If it exists, it’s self-induced.
Take El Salvador, the go-to example of abortion madness. El Salvador’s penal code is widely read to outlaw all abortions, period (though the United Nations notes that the country’s penal code can be interpreted to make an exception in the case of danger to the life of the mother).
This is not some vestige of old-fashioned morality crimping the enlightened mores of 21st-century people. In 1997, the country’s legislature rewrote the penal code to remove exceptions to the abortion prohibition, exceptions that had been in place since 1973. That is, in the late 1990s the country became more anti-abortion, not less. And that wasn’t a fluke.
More than two-thirds of the legislative assembly voted for the harsher provision. Then, two years later, the country amended its constitution to recognize human life as beginning from the moment of conception.
Continue reading below…
Leave a Reply