ocked Down and Fed Up,

Australians Find Their Own

Ways to Speed Vaccinations
A stubborn Delta outbreak has kicked a complacent country into gear, with
community members working to fill gaps in the government’s sputtering vaccine
rollout.







Waiting for a vaccination outside a pharmacy in Cabramatta, a southwestern
suburb of Sydney. Credit...Matthew Abbott for The New York Times

By Damien Cave
Aug. 12, 2021

HOWARD SPRINGS, Australia — After an order of the AstraZeneca coronavirus

vaccine from the government never materialized, Quinn On realized on Monday
that a busy pharmacy he manages in Western Sydney would soon run out of
doses. He raced to pick up shots from one of his other stores, while his wife
pleaded with local officials for extra supplies.

Their mom-and-pop business has become a vaccination hub where it matters

most — in the part of the city where Covid-19 case numbers refuse to decline
despite a seven-week lockdown. They had already hired extra pharmacists. They
set up a tent on the sidewalk to safely register arrivals. And on Monday, with all
their scrambling, they secured a few hundred shots to inoculate a long line of
people by day’s end.
“It’s costing us money to do this, but I’m doing this for the community,” said
Mr. On, 51, who came to Australia from Vietnam as a refugee when he was 8.
“I’m just hoping it will work.”
ADVERTISEMENT

The Irish Times view on Argentina

legalising abortion: a major breakthrough
President Alberto Fernández was right when he said abortion is already a reality
in his country and the question is in reality one of social justice
Thu, Dec 31, 2020, 12:04

 11

Pro-choice protesters dance outside the National Congress as senators decide on the legalization of
abortion on Tuesday in Buenos Aires, Argentina. The proposal authorises legal, voluntary and free
interruption of pregnancy until the 14th week while allowing doctor’s conscientious objection. Photograph:
Ricardo Ceppi/Getty Images
 

The decision by Argentina’s senate to legalise abortion marks a major advance for
women’s rights in Latin America and the Caribbean, home to some of the most
restrictive reproductive health laws in the world.
Before yesterday’s vote to allow terminations up to the 14th week of pregnancy,
only in Cuba, Guyana, Uruguay and parts of Mexico did the region’s women have
the right to choose. The overwhelming majority instead live in countries with
minimal access to abortion, which is typically restricted to cases of rape or where
the life of the mother is at risk. In six nations the procedure is not allowed under any
circumstances.
Yet despite these prohibitions abortion is a reality across Latin America. Millions
are carried out clandestinely each year. For the well-heeled there are discreet
clinics in large cities offering a relatively safe service. But the poor majority seeking
a termination must take their chances with backstreet abortionists. It is from among
these women most of the 760,000 annual hospitalisations due to complications from
unsafe procedures are drawn. Many lose their lives. In Argentina over 3,000 women
have died from botched abortions since the return of democracy in 1983 while
39,000 are left hospitalised each year. President Alberto Fernández was right when
he said abortion is already a reality in his country and the question is in reality one
of social justice.
Fernández deserves credit for his government’s proactive role in the push to
decriminalise. But this is ultimately a victory for Argentina’s women’s rights
movement. Its 15-year long pro-choice campaign, itself the product of decades of
mobilisation and organisation by feminist activists, has delivered a hugely
significant breakthrough with wider implications for a region in which Argentine
society exerts significant social and cultural influence. Women’s rights activists
across Latin America and the Caribbean will draw strength and inspiration from this
success as they wage their own long campaigns against what remain formidable
legal, political, religious and cultural obstacles.
 Abortion Is Now Legal in
Argentina, but Opponents Are
Making It Hard to Get
Anti-abortion activists are suing to block a new law allowing the procedure, and
many doctors in conservative areas have declared themselves conscientious
objectors.





Abortion opponents outside the National Congress in Buenos Aires in
December. Credit...Sarah Pabst for The New York Times

By Daniel Politi
March 7, 2021

Leer en español

BUENOS AIRES — For the first time in more than a century, women in
Argentina can legally get an abortion, but that landmark shift in law may do
them little good at hospitals like the one in northern Jujuy Province where all
but one obstetrician have a simple response: No.

Abortion opponents are reeling after a measure legalizing the procedure was

signed into law in December, but they have hardly given up. They have filed
lawsuits arguing that the new law is unconstitutional. And they have made sure
doctors know that they can refuse to terminate pregnancies, a message that is
being embraced by many in rural areas.

“The law is already a reality, but that doesn’t mean we have to stay still,” said
Dr. Gloria Abán, a general practitioner and abortion opponent who travels the
remote Calchaquí Valleys of Salta Province to see patients. “We must be
proactive.”

In neighboring Jujuy, 29 of the 30 obstetricians at the Hector Quintana

Maternity and Children’s hospital have declared themselves conscientious
objectors, as the law allows. So have all but a handful of the 120 gynecologists in
the province, said Dr. Rubén Véliz, head of the obstetrics department at Hector
Quintana.
ADVERTISEMENT
Continue reading the main story

“We’re really standing in the eye of the hurricane,” he said.

Argentina’s abortion law represented a big shift for reproductive rights in Latin
America, which has among the strictest such laws in the world, galvanizing
movements to expand access to safe abortion in Colombia, Mexico and Chile.
But even officials in President Alberto Fernández’s administration, which
introduced the bill, acknowledge that hard work remains to ensure that women
are able to gain access to the procedure. “Activists will have to play a key role,”
Elizabeth Gómez Alcorta, Argentina’s minister of women, gender and diversity,
said in an interview.

Image
Supporters of abortion rights celebrating in Buenos Aires as Argentina became the
largest nation in Latin America to legalize abortion.Credit...Sarah Pabst for The New
York Times

The law, which went into effect on Jan. 24, allows pregnancies to be terminated
in the first 14 weeks. Before then, abortion, which was outlawed when Argentina
adopted its first criminal code in 1886, was legal only in cases of rape or if the
pregnancy posed a threat to the mother’s health.

In recent days, anti-abortion activists — who battled unsuccessfully as

lawmakers debated the measure — have turned to the courts, filing lawsuits in
at least 10 provinces seeking to have the new law declared unconstitutional.

They won an early skirmish in the northern province of Chaco, where a judge
issued a preliminary injunction blocking the law from taking effect late last
month. But abortion rights activists expect to prevail in the courts.

“It was expected that some sectors would make the decision to go to judges to
try to block the law,” said Vilma Ibarra, the president’s legal secretary, who
wrote the abortion bill and played a key role in its passage.

It is also expected, she said, that one of the cases will make it to the Supreme
Court, and it will uphold the law: “We have no doubt.”

But the courts are not the biggest hurdle.

The law faces widespread opposition among doctors in rural areas, particularly
in northern provinces where Catholic and evangelical churches have
considerable influence.

“In my hospital, around 90 percent of health care professionals are

conscientious objectors,” said Dr. Mirta Gisela Reynaga, a gynecologist in
Tucumán province who is an anti-abortion activist.
Abortion rights activists say that officials at the federal and state level have been
slow to draw up plans to put the new law into effect, especially in
conservative areas. That, they say, has given their opponents the upper
hand.
Editors’ Picks

Continue reading the main story

“Those who are against this law are much quicker than the ministry, and they’re
pressuring people to sign up as conscientious objectors,” said Dr. Cecilia
Ousset, a gynecologist in Tucumán, a conservative province known for
restrictive policies on terminating pregnancies.

Image
An exam room at a health center that advises women on reproductive issues and
performs abortions in Buenos Aires.Credit...Victor R. Caivano/Associated Press

Dr. Ousset became embroiled in Argentina’s abortion wars in 2019 after helping
an 11-year-old girl who was raped but was denied an abortion. The baby was
delivered in a C-section but died shortly thereafter. The case inflamed passions
across the country.

Officials say the opposition by doctors will have limited impact because the vast
majority of abortions within the first 14 weeks of pregnancy are carried out
with pills and do not require a medical procedure. Even when a procedure is
needed, they said, there will be ways to work around roadblocks.

“The practice is guaranteed, because if a certain hospital does not have

professionals who are not conscientious objectors we will transfer the patient,”
said Dr. Claudia Castro, who leads the women’s health department in the
maternity and infancy division of Jujuy’s Health Ministry.

In rural areas, though, it may be difficult for women to ask for help in the first
place.

María Laura Lerma, a psychologist in the Quebrada de Humahuaca, a remote

mountain valley in Jujuy, said doctors often tried to scare pregnant women off
abortion. Health care workers, she said, “will often tell young women her fetus
will become an elf.”

“It’s one of many popular beliefs that are in the collective imagination,” said Ms.
Lerma, who belongs to an abortion rights coalition of health care providers.
Recently, Ms. Lerma said, a woman in her early 20s came to see her and said
she was terrified about the prospect of having an abortion because a
gynecologist had told her it would cause cancer.
As they work to improve access to abortion in rural areas, activists are also
seeking to expunge the criminal records of hundreds of women who were
charged with crimes related to abortion in recent years. The Center for Legal
and Social Studies, a human rights group that campaigned in favor of legalizing
abortion, said that from 2012 to 2020, there were more than 1,500
prosecutions directly related to abortion and 37 for “obstetric events,” which
typically refers to miscarriages.
The first category may be easier to handle. Since abortion is now allowed, any
pending cases may be thrown out, though “this won’t be so automatic,” said
Diego Morales, a lawyer with the legal center.

Image
Michell, a granddaughter of Rosalía Reyes, who was sentenced to eight years in prison
after she miscarried.Credit...Magali Druscovich/Reuters

Activists want to ensure that even cases that did not lead to convictions are
expunged.

“Convictions are very low, but the criminal process operates as punishment due
to the stigma,” said Soledad Deza, a lawyer in Tucumán who has represented
many women accused of having abortions.

The bigger challenge are charges involving so-called obstetric events, filed after
women report late-term miscarriages or stillbirths. Some prosecutors have
treated such cases as murders.

Victoria Tesoriero, a senior official at the Interior Ministry, said this was part of
a strategy by the “misogynistic” judicial system to “hide the situation” that
women were effectively being prosecuted for miscarriages.

Natalia Saralegui Ferrante, a law professor at the University of Buenos Aires,

was the co-author of a book published last year that brought to light how
common such prosecutions had become. Sometimes, she said, the women said
they had not even known they were pregnant — “but nobody believed them.”

“There should be a presumption of innocence in our judicial system,” Ms.

Saralegui Ferrante said, “but in these cases it was the other way around, there
was a presumption of culpability.”
One woman, Rosalía Reyes, was placed under house arrest after being sentenced
to eight years. She says she suffered a miscarriage when she was seven months
pregnant.

Judges declared it murder.

As a mother of four, the judges reasoned, Ms. Reyes should have known how to
cut the umbilical cord, even though she lost so much blood she fainted, said her
lawyer, Fabiana Vannini.

Ms. Vannini hopes she may now have a way to reopen the case. The new law,
she argues, does more than just legalize abortion.

“It also changes the paradigm of what is a woman, and who has control over her
body, her uterus,” the lawyer said.