3 Women Stabbed in March to Legalize Abortion in Chile

July 26, 2018 (teleSUR): Chile: 3 Women Stabbed in March to Legalize Abortion, by teleSUR:

Three women in Santiago, Chile were stabbed during a march to demand, legal, safe, and free abortion care by a group of hooded attackers who assaulted the protesters. Around 40,000 women marched in the demonstrations.

The three injured women received medical attention and are currently in stable condition.

There is a concerning trend of violence and harassment against pro-choice activists in South America. In Argentina, the country's Senate is debating a bill to legalize abortion within the first 14 weeks. Several videos showing men threatening women for carrying their staple green handkerchief, a symbol of the abortion rights movement in Argentina, have recently surfaced. Some of the women have been threatened with rape.

“This is terrorism; I don’t want to call it any other way. When a group wants to intimidate another to keep them from expressing their ideas freely,” says Macarena Castañeda, spokesperson for the Mesa de Accion por el Aborto, one of the groups leading the fight for access to legal, safe, and free abortion care in Chile.

The hooded attackers also injured a security officer. According to the police, several attackers are currently detained.

In Chile, former military dictator Augusto Pinochet criminalized abortion in all its forms in 1989. That law remained in place until 2017 with the approval of a bill proposed by then-president Michelle Bachelet that decriminalized abortion in three cases: rape, a risk to the mother's life, and disability. Those exceptions only comprise 3% of all abortions in Chile, according to abortion rights groups. 

Abortion remains mostly illegal in Latin America. Only in Uruguay and Cuba is it entirely legal, as well as in the Mexican capital of Mexico City.