What if I told you that officials in Paraguay won’t allow a victim of a horrific sexual assault to get an abortion? You’d wonder how anyone would be that heartless. Now what if I told you that victim is a 10-year-old girl?
Last month, a woman in Luque, a suburb of the capital, Asuncion, took her 10-year-old daughter to the hospital after noticing her stomach was starting to swell and ache. The mother thought it was a tumor–but it turned out that her daughter was pregnant. It turned out that the mother had suspected her husband–the girl’s stepfather–was molesting her daughter. She’d complained to authorities last year, to no avail.
To the mother’s mind, the evidence was unmistakable–this pregnancy was the result of an appalling breach of trust. She asked doctors to abort the baby. A no-brainer, right? However, the doctors turned the request down. Paraguay has some of the strictest abortion laws in the world. Abortion is only permitted when the mother’s life is in danger. Most Latin American countries have very strict laws on abortion; in Chile, for instance, abortion is completely banned even in cases of rape, incest, or danger to the mother’s life.
To their credit, Paraguayan officials believe that the girl was indeed raped. They have issued a warrant for the stepfather’s arrest. However, they arrested the mother on April 27 and charged her with failing in her duty of care. Incredibly, a judge was actually considering whether to charge the mother as an accomplice in the rape.
Nonetheless, Paraguayan health officials let it be known they won’t even consider bending the rules–at least for now, anyway. Lida Sosa, the director of healthcare programs at the country’s health ministry, claimed that at this point, “there is no reason to interrupt the pregnancy.” She even claimed that since the girl is more than 22 weeks into her pregnancy, an abortion would be too dangerous to even consider “without a well-considered medical, obstetrical evaluation.”
Activists both inside and outside Paraguay are understandably outraged. Lilian Soto, a prominent feminist activist in Paraguay and a former presidential candidate, said that “the anatomical and psychological risks” are simply too great to allow a girl under 13 to let a pregnancy continue. Dalia Brahmi, the director of clinical affairs at Ipas, agrees. She says that if a girl under 15 carries a pregnancy to term, she has a very high risk of “eclampsia, infection, preterm birth and intrauterine growth restriction” compared to an adult mother. Eclampsia is a seizure brought on by high blood pressure or protein in the urine, while intrauterine growth restriction results in the fetus not growing properly while in the womb. Small wonder that Brahmi thinks forcing a 10-year-old to become a mother is “cruel.”
Many of you know that I was once weakly pro-life. But even then, I believed abortion should be allowed in cases of rape, incest, or danger to the mother’s life. It was really simple in my book–forcing a victim of rape or incest to keep her baby would effectively be telling her that it was somehow her fault. Seen in this light, forcing a 10-year-old girl to keep a baby that was the product of rape or incest is absolutely heinous. It’s also dangerous. Backing up Brahmi’s studies, the World Health Organization concluded that Latin American girls younger than 16 years old are more likely to die in childbirth than women in their 20s.
At this stage in the game, it may take international pressure to get Paraguay to change its mind. Amnesty International has started a petition asking President Horacio Cartes to let this little girl have an abortion, arguing that the mere fact she is so young makes it very likely she won’t survive if she’s forced to keep the pregnancy going. Indeed, the director of the hospital caring for the girl admits she’s at very high risk. It’s already getting results–on Thursday, a judge convened an interdisciplinary panel to advise on the best course of action. Nonetheless, if Paraguayan officials won’t come to their senses and end this travesty, they ought to be ashamed of themselves.
