Tuesday, November 14, 2006

Protesting in Nicaragua: El Aborto Terapeutico

Two days before leaving Nicaragua I joined the feminist movement in protest against the Parliament’s then pending decision to repeal Penal Code 165 that allows for ‘el aborto terapeútico/therapeutic abortion.” I’m no longer sure how to say El Aborto Terapeútico in English but it is the abortion that they perform when the mother or fetus’ life is in danger so if anyone knows how to say it in English please send me an email or comment on this post. Anyway, Nicaragua is one of the first and few countries in Central America to allow El Aborto Terapeútico and established the law in 1893 as a ‘circumstancial clause’ that protected a woman’s life in the event of a risky pregnancy. Penal Code 165 has also been used in the past for women and little girls who decide not to follow through with pregnancies conceived through rape. Perhaps the most touching story, and where Penal Coded 165 proved to be even more pivotal was when Rosa, a Costa Rican nine year old girl who got pregnant after being raped on her way to school. Given that Costa Rican law disallows abortion irregardless of the circumstances, Rosas’ parent were forced to take her to Nicaragua and have the abortion performed there. So why is it that all of a sudden, the Nicaraguan government and parliament decided to repeal a law that people established 100 years ago to protect a woman’s life?

Answer: Election Time
Last year the FSLN, the ALN and the PLC made a pact to disallow the creation of new parties and to control all legislative and legal institutions in Nicaragua and to keep power among themselves. (please see footnote) Three weeks before the election, they needed the vote of poor people in Nicaragua—most of whom are catholic. Shifting the discourse from saving the life of the woman to killing unborn children and clumping el aborto terapeútico with all forms of abortion is not really about ‘morals’, as much as it is about votes and getting as many of them as possible at election time. So after a night of protest with various feminist organizations in front of the National Assembly, on October 26, 2006, the Nicaraguan government, president Bolaños, the Frente Sandinista de La Liberación Nicaragüense (FSLN) and the catholic church voted to repeal Penal Code 165 and eliminated all forms of abortion in Nicaragua. And of course, on November 5, 2006, the FSLN won the elections and regained power with 35% of the vote.

But what was important for me was to be part of the protest the night before the law was passed. First of all, protests in Nicaragua are nothing like protests in Jamaica where people block the road and go home after the media leaves, a protest in Nicaragua lasts for several days with thousands of people chanting in front of the Assembly “DIPUTADOS, SI NO RESPETAN MI VIDA…NO OBEDEZCO LA LEY!” (DEPUTIES, IF YOU DON’T RESPECT MY LIFE, I WON’T OBBEY THE LAW!)

These people brought food, placards, showed movies about the life of Rosa from Costa Rica and slept outside the Assembly because that is what real protest means. These people were hardcore! I noticed that when the police and soldiers surrounded the protestors, we just gave them food and it kept them quite for the rest of the night. There’s nothing like a ham and cheese sandwich to keep the cops away. I guess they give them snickers to avoid speeding tickets. The Nicaraguan police force I tell you…can’t beat it.

The second point of interest for me was the fact that so many men were at the protest. Men and women were showed up in equal number to fight for women’s rights and to represent feminist movements as well as the Evangelical church who also stood against the repeal of the law.
So many men spoke out at the protest against the government ‘para salvar a la vida de mi hermana, de mi mama, de mi novia, de mi hija (in order to save my sister’s life, my mother’s life, my girlfriend’s life and my daughter’s life). The presence of men who openly and actively identified as feminists at the protest was fascinating to me and important because it debunked all the myths about who a feminist is (i.e a lesbian and not a man) and demonstrated that the whole notion that these issues are only women issues’ who don’t matter to anyone is just not true. Yes, that protest was a lesson to me. Not because I don’t know any feminist men or because I believe that only women can be feminists but because in the past when I saw men at feminist conferences, they were often tokenized. Also, as progressive as I am, I too had internalized the Macho third world latino man image that I used to see on television. So their involvement was an eye-opener for me and I left the protest believing that the Nicaraguan feminist movement may be even more inclusive and diverse than other feminist movements I’ve seen in other parts of the world. Cheers to the face of feminism…because this is what a feminist looks like:




Footnote:
Please read up on the pact: here is the link to an article in English:
http://www.opendemocracy.net/democracy-protest/nicaragua_3041.jsp

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

I'm pro-choice myself and support a woman's right to abortion not only in "extreme" cases but in ones where she simply does not wish to be pregnant. However, I will say that the "Rosa" case was subject to a great deal of misinformation. First, it appears that Rosa was not raped on her way to school but probably molested by her stepfather. The stepfather apparently played the nice New Age guy for a while (talking about his stepdaughter's reproductive rights, saying he would kill her abuser, even colluding in falsely accusing a Costa Rican man of raping her) until he impregnated Rosa (probably for the second time) when she was in her early teens. Admittedly, the feminist movement involved in the case looked at worst duplicitous by giving this man a mouthpiece and at best naive by not at least suspecting him of being responsible for the pregnancy in the first place (apparently the Costa Rican authorities wanted to investigate him but he left the country). Anyway, just my opinion.

Emily