Legalization of abortion in Uruguay indication of region-wide strategy

Buenos Aires, Argentina, Nov 9, 2007 / 10:00 am

The president of the NGO Pro-Vida, Roberto Castellano, warned that what happened this week in Uruguay, where the Senate legalized abortion, confirms the existence of a strategy to establish an organized agenda against human life in Latin America.
 
According to Castellano, the case of Uruguay—added to similar episodes in other countries—“reveals that at the regional level there is concerted and systematic pressure to impose an agenda against human life based on the promotion of contraception, the liberalization of abortion, surgical sterilization and the dismantling of the traditional family composed of a man and a woman by making same-sex unions equivalent to marriage.”
 
“To what has occurred in Uruguay we must add local projects with the same purpose: the legalization ordered by the courts in Colombia, as well as the law recently approved—by a narrow margin—in Mexico City,” Castellano said.
 
He also recalled that in Chile the government has made it “official policy to force pharmacies to sell the morning-after abortion pill, as is the case in our country.  Similar initiatives to those of Uruguay exist in Paraguay, and recently Brazil’s president Ignacio Lula Da Silva has expressed his intention to advance the recognition of legal abortion despite public acceptance of the practice being at historic lows.”
 
Castellano said proof of the international anti-life strategy can be seen from “the presence and pressure that the International Planned Parenthood Federation (IPPF) carried out for such purposes in Uruguay recently as well as the assistance that the Ford Foundation has given to pro-abortion groups.”
 
“The statements made by Giselle Carino, director of IPPF’s ‘Safe abortion Division’ about the Senate’s decision are public. The IPPF has central offices in New York and London and is the main provider of abortions worldwide through its network of abortion clinics,” he added.
 
Castellano said anti-life policies are explained by the need of international centers of power to control demographic growth, “especially in areas of the world that are rich in prime materials and burdened with heavy debt. Thus these centers ensure two things: the supplying of the resources they need and the payment of external debt [creating]… the need for social investment to reduce the regional fertility index,” he said.