Chile won’t let pregnant 11-year-old raped by her mother’s boyfriend have an abortion

She is known as Belén. She is eleven years old and 14 weeks pregnant. She was raped repeatedly by her mother’s boyfriend over the course of two years. The mother claims the relationship that started when her daughter was NINE was consensual. Thankfully, Belén’s grandmother doesn’t see it that way, and she alerted the police to the abuse, which the boyfriend admitted to. There are several reasons even an anti-choicer would think Belén deserves an abortion:

• She is eleven years old.
• She is a rape victim.
• She is the victim of incest.
• The pregnancy poses a serious health risk to Belen.
• The health of the fetus is at risk

Belén’s doctors want to terminate. But they are afraid to. Because Belén happens to live in one of the five countries (along with El Salvador, the Dominican Republic, Nicaragua, and Malta) that does not allow abortions under any circumstances. So, tragically, outrageously, and– I wish– unbelievably, Belén is being forced to carry her pregnancy to term in a country controlled by conservative sectors and the Catholic Church. Chile’s abortion laws have regressed. Abortion in Chile used to be legal for medical reasons, but the notoriously authoritarian and torture-loving dictator Augusto Pinochet put an end to that when he took power in a coup in 1973. Though the country is no longer living under dictatorship, it continues to live its legacy and under dictatorial abortion laws. Chile only legalized divorce in 2004. Chile’s president, the conservative Sebastián Piñera opposes reforming Chile’s abortion laws. And last year the senate voted against bills that would have legalized abortion in the case of rape, a nonviable fetus, and for the health and safety of the woman.

This may sound similar. In another extremely conservative and Catholic Latin American country,  El Salvador, doctors wanted wanted to terminate the pregnancy of a patient whose health and life were at risk and whose fetus had Anencephaly, a severe and lethal birth defect in which the brain or part of the brain is missing. Thanks to the international media attention and pressure, El Salvador ultimately allowed Beatriz, who is 22 and suffers from lupus and almost died during her first pregnancy, to have an abortion. But they claimed the abortion was a delivery and removed the fetus through a c-section, which is much more dangerous than the D&C Beatrice’s doctors wanted to perform. Or you may be thinking of another extremely Catholic country in Europe, where a woman was denied an abortion of her nonviable fetus because Ireland “is a Catholic country.” In this case, Savita Halappanavar died.

We have to make sure to raise our voices in this case as well and support Chilean campaigns to reform abortion laws. And there is some good news. Former president Michele Bachelet and survivor of torture under Pinochet, who is likely to win the presidency once again, is committed to changing legalizing abortion, at least in the cases of rape and for health reasons, as she tweeted on Friday, the day the story of Belen broke.