Vol. 77/No. 41      November 18, 2013

Legislators Paola Pabón, Gina Godoy and Soledad Buendía sought to decriminalize abortions in cases of rape or when a woman’s life or health is at risk. Pabón, who had made the motion to change the legislation Oct. 10, retracted it the following day under threats from Correa to end their terms as deputies in the National Assembly. The three were suspended for a month by the Alianza País’ ethics commission.

Correa called Pabón, Godoy and Buendía “treacherous and disloyal” and demagogically threatened to resign his post if the National Assembly loosened abortion laws. “I will never approve the decriminalization of abortion,” said Correa in an Oct. 10 television interview. “Our constitution pledges to defend life from the moment of conception.”

In Latin America more than 4 million women are forced to resort to illegal, and often substandard, abortions each year. Thousands suffer serious injury as a result.

“The traitors are not those who thought it was correct to defend the life of women,” said Pabón in her statement withdrawing the proposal. “With much affection we have to tell you that this time you are mistaken.”

Correa, a self-described “left-wing, humanist, Roman Catholic,” who claims to be leading a “citizens’ revolution” in Ecuador, is among other leading left bourgeois politicians in Latin America who are fighting against women’s right to choose abortion.

In 2006, Nicaraguan President Daniel Ortega’s Sandinista Front backed a new law banning all abortions. In 2008, former Uruguayan President Tabaré Vázquez, a long-time leader of the Socialist Party, vetoed a bill decriminalizing abortions. In Venezuela, abortion is illegal, forcing many working-class women to resort to unsafe abortions. “Call me a conservative, but I don’t agree with abortions to stop a pregnancy,” said late President Hugo Chávez in 2012.

Abortion “of course is a crime,” said Evo Morales, Bolivia’s president, back in July in response to a public debate provoked by a challenge to an existing abortion law, which restricts the procedure to cases of rape and health.

Patricia Mancilla, a deputy of Morales’ Movement Toward Socialism party, said she was motivated to press for changes “because of the deaths of so many women as a result of our country’s underdevelopment.”  
 
 
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