Hundreds of doctors have staged anti-abortion protests in Argentina as an abortion rights bill moves toward a vote in the Senate next week. Some have demonstrated while carrying models of unborn babies and waving signs saying: “I’m a doctor, not a murderer.” At one recent protest, they laid white medical coats on the ground outside the presidential palace.
While the Doctors for Life activist group claims about 1,000 members, its protests are feeding a debate in the profession as a whole about the move to legalize abortions for any reason in the first 14 weeks of pregnancy.
Leaders of the Argentina Medical Society have endorsed the bill, which has already passed the lower house of Parliament. But the Academy of Medicine vehemently rejects the legislation. The academy issued a statement that human life begins at conception and “to destroy a human embryo means impeding the birth of a human being.”
“Nothing good can come when society chooses death as a solution,” it said.
The measure only narrowly passed in the Chamber of Deputies on June 14 after a long campaign by hundreds of feminist and left-wing groups. Its advance appears to have galvanized opponents, religious and otherwise, to mobilize public protests ahead of a Senate vote tentatively set for Aug. 8. President Mauricio Macri has said he will sign the measure if it passes, despite opposing abortion.
Pope Francis this year denounced abortion as the “white glove” equivalent of the Nazi-era eugenics program and urged families “to accept the children that God gives them,” but he has not spoken publicly on the debate in Argentina.
