Argentine demonstrators protest anti-abortion ruling outside US Embassy

Dozens of women marched to the American Embassy in Buenos Aires on Monday to repudiate the US Supreme Court ruling that overturns the federal right to US citizens to abortion, which was legalised in Argentina in December 2020.

"What happened in the United States, this ruling that takes away the possibility of continuing to terminate a pregnancy, is a total injustice and marks a violation of women's human rights," said Nina Brugo Marcó, a 78-year-old lawyer who is a member of the Campaña por el Aborto Legal Seguro y Gratuito ("Campaign for Safe and Free Legal Abortion") campaign group, which is pushing for legalisation in Argentina, told AFP.

The demonstrators carried flags and green handkerchiefs, a symbol of the struggle for the legalisation of abortion born of Argentina and which has become adopted internationally by other campaigners.

"We know that, as it has been in our country, that it is a hard fight but it can be won and it is to confront this advance of the anti-rights sectors. Today more than ever we need international solidarity, just as the green tide crossed borders," said Celeste Fierro, a feminist leader of the left-wing Movimiento Socialista de los Trabajadores (Socialist Workers Movement, MST).

The demonstration repudiated the ruling of the conservative-dominated US Supreme Court, which on Friday overturned the historic Roe v. Wade ruling, which since 1973 had guaranteed the right of US women to have an abortion.

That decision "is a punch in the gut, even though we knew it was coming, this is going to be incredibly harmful to women and girls in the United States," said Julia McReynolds-Perez, a US sociology professor who is in Buenos Aires doing research on the legalisation of abortion in Argentina.

The 45-year-old South Carolina professor insisted that it is "easily going back 50 years to the pre-Roe era" and warned that with this court "equal marriage, reproductive rights, contraception are all on the table as rights that we risk losing in the coming months and years."

– TIMES/AFP