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Abortion Helps Realign Puerto Rico’s Politics


SAN JUAN, PR – Three years ago, after Puerto Rico’s legislature narrowly defeated new abortion restrictions, cardiologist and pastor Dr. César Vázquez Muñiz formed a political party. whose mission is to “protect life”.

Now, with just one senator and one representative in the Legislative Assembly, Dr Vázquez’s emerging party, Project Dignity, has helped spearhead a new effort to limit abortion on the island, one of only a handful of US jurisdictions when the procedure is still legal at any point during pregnancy.

The abortion war is the clearest sign yet that Puerto Rican politics, which have long focused on whether the island should keep its territory or seek to become a state, is reunifying. Fed up with the status issue overshadowing everyone’s resolution of everyday problems, voters began to band together around new parties focused on social and ideological issues. partisan thought. As a result, legislative debates have begun to resemble those between Democrats and Republicans in the states – providing an opportunity for conservatives to develop their power.

Dr Vázquez said in a recent interview: “We want to protect our children before birth and other specific ideological issues. “But basically, we want to go back to 40 years of government corruption.”

In June, the Puerto Rican Senate passed legislation banning abortions after 22 weeks, with no exceptions for rape or incest. Five days later, the U.S. Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade. Puerto Rican lawmakers have since filed a series of other bills restricting abortion, including a Dignity Project bill that would ban it after about six weeks of pregnancy, suggesting a stance Increasingly aggressive by some legislators against the procedure.

“The political class has been too timid,” Senator Joanne Rodríguez Veve, a member of Project Dignity and a sponsor of the 22-week ban, said in an interview. “Women have the power to decide many things in our lives – our careers, our friends, our jobs. Women do not have the right to decide who lives and who dies.

Even if the relatively modest 22-week ban ultimately failed – lawmakers in the House of Representatives were more chilling with the idea – abortion rights advocates in Puerto Rico fear that they is currently fighting two anti-abortion strategies that have been successful in many states: avoiding legal abortion with partial restrictions and seeking to eliminate it altogether, a tactic that has gained momentum since the end of Roe.

“It’s a hostile and difficult environment,” said Dr Yarí Vale Moreno, an obstetrician and gynecologist who runs an abortion clinic in the capital, San Juan. “We will go backwards, as has happened in the states.”

The result of Economic Crisis, bankrupt, Hurricane Maria, political scandal and coronavirus pandemicPuerto Ricans have begun to abandon traditional parties defined by whether the island should maintain a commonwealth, become a state, or seek independence, moving instead to fledgling organizations more interested in social issues, like Project Dignity.

“I think traditional parties are going to explode in the next five years,” said Eduardo Bhatia, a former Senate president from the pro-commonwealth party who now teaches at Princeton. “You will have two parties, liberals and conservatives. We will be more like Democrats and Republicans.”

Mr. Bhatia added that community activists are part of the political machine and used to organize campaigns have been replaced over time by the majority of evangelical pastors, especially outsiders. outside the San Juan metropolitan area.

In Puerto Rico’s last election, in 2020Many young voters have turned to the Citizens Victory Movement, a party whose leaders say addressing the island’s economic and social problems is more important than addressing the question of status. Some Christian conservatives have turned to Project Dignity. Most Puerto Ricans are Catholic, and Pew Research survey found in 2014, of the 33 percent on the island that identified as Protestant, about half also identified as born-again Christians.

The result is a hard-to-label legislature that has stepped up penalties against gender-based violence but is also considering restrictions on abortion – a dynamic that challenges the view of many in Washington that if Puerto Rico were a state, it would be a free country. Haven.

“This is a legislature that reflects the complexity of Puerto Rico,” said Senator Ana Irma Rivera Lassén, a member of the Citizens Victory Movement. “Nobody has an absolute majority right now. You always have to look for votes on the other side.”

The day after the high court overturned Roe, Representative Lisie J. Burgos Muñiz, of Project Dignity, filed a bill punishing women who had abortions with a 99-year prison sentence. She withdrew the proposal a day later, amid backlash, but has revealed her intention to pursue tougher policies.

Abortion has a complicated history in Puerto Rico. It was criminalized in 1902, four years after the United States occupied the island, although the procedure was allowed to save the mother’s life. Access was expanded in 1937 to include the protection of maternal health as part of a law that also promoted mass sterilization of women, fueling suspicion in the health care system. . This law spurred a network of clandestine abortion providers to form.

Before Roe’s original decision in 1973, wealthy pregnant women sometimes came to the island from the states to have abortions, on trips known as “San Juan weekends.” After Roe, pregnant women from countries in Latin America and the Caribbean continued to seek abortions in Puerto Rico. In 1980, the Supreme Court of Puerto Rico ruled that abortion was protected under a provision in the island’s Constitution that guaranteed the right to close proximity.

The right to abortion was then unrestricted, although opinion polls indicate that many Puerto Ricans are socially conservative. One Pew Research survey found As of 2017, about three-quarters of Puerto Ricans living on the island oppose abortion in all or most cases, compared with about half of Puerto Ricans living in the states.

“Puerto Rico is generally more conservative than liberal,” said Kenneth McClintock, former secretary of state and president of the Puerto Rican Senate for the pro-state party.

But from a practical standpoint, poverty, domestic violence, and lack of access to sex education and health care have made abortion an important right for many Puerto Rican women. And with the island’s territorial status dominating public discussions, abortion and other social issues have historically not influenced Puerto Rican politics the way they have in the states.

Abortion on the island is limited due to a lack of access and doctors willing or trained to perform the procedure later in pregnancy. Years of economic instability have led to massive brain drain, especially in the health sector, since the pandemic, staff shortages have increased. Today, Puerto Rico, with a population of about 3.2 million, has fewer than 100 gynecologists.

The number of abortion clinics on the island has dropped to four from 43 in 1980, according to the Pro-Life Association of Puerto Rico. Abortion rights advocates dispute the older figure; The Puerto Rico Health Department lists the number of clinics in 2000 as eight.

Three of the remaining four clinics – all concentrated in the San Juan area – offer abortions up to about 14 weeks of gestation, according to service providers; At the fourth clinic, Dr. Vale offers abortions up to 24 weeks. Abortions before that time were performed at the University Hospital, and only for cases of fetal death or if the mother’s health was in jeopardy.

The Puerto Rico Department of Health reported 4,225 abortions in clinics last year. Most are intended for women up to 10 weeks pregnant. One abortion was performed at 21 weeks and no later abortions, although the gestational length of three abortions is not available.

At recent hearings held in the Puerto Rican House of Representatives, vendors – many of whom wore green to symbolize the right to abortion – emphasized the need for poor women suffering limited access to health insurance and victims of gender-based violence, which was rampant last year. government declare this an emergency.

Last month, at the Iella clinic in San Juan, which raises funds to help offset the cost of abortion care for about a quarter of its patients, Frances Collazo Cáeres, the clinic’s legal counsel, said the Providers have faced increasing harassment, especially online, as the abortion debate has escalated.

Opponents have waged periodic campaigns to limit the procedure here. In 2019, lawmakers required parental consent for abortions for girls under the age of 18 and a 48-hour waiting period for all abortions, the kind of increased limit that many previously applied by the state.

But the governor at the time, Ricardo A. Rosselló, a Democrat from the pro-state party, vetoed the bill. The legislature, controlled by his party, voted shyly to veto his veto. Project Dignity went public shortly after.

About seven years ago, Christian missionaries from Tampa, Fla., opened Puerto Rico’s first “crisis pregnancy center” in Bayamón, near San Juan, a few blocks from an abortion clinic. One recent morning, Liza Arroyo and Abdiel Contreras, activists from the center, waited outside the clinic, trying to convince women to keep their pregnancies.

Mr. Contreras, 40, supports the six-week ban on abortions proposed by the Dignity Project, which is tied to initiating fetal heartbeat activity. But he said he was skeptical that lawmakers would pass it, calling them more liberal than their constituents.

“People don’t believe in abortion,” Mr. Contreras said. “But the legislature is not the voice of the people.”

He said he used to vote for Puerto Rico’s pro-independence party, until the party took on more liberal social issues. He stopped voting for a few years, feeling that no party represented him.

In 2020, he voted for Project Dignity.



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