UN to Argentina: Legalize Abortions For Adolescents

The UN Committee on the Rights of the Child (UNCRC) is urging Argentina to ensure safe abortions and postabortion care for adolescents.

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The UNCRC report says that the Argentine government should ensure "access to safe abortion services and postabortion care for adolescents, ensuring that their opinions are always heard and duly taken into account as part of the process of decision making."

This recommendation comes just before the Argentine House of Representatives is set to make a historic vote later this month that could make abortions free and legal up to 14 weeks of inception. One of the pro-abortion bills does address abortion rights for those under 16 years of age.

The committee is recommending that pregnant females 13 to 16 years old be able to make the decision to terminate their pregnancy. Whether or not they would need parental consent is still under debate.

"Before everyone starts exaggerating and saying that a law legalizing abortion would be unconstitutional, the … International Convention on the Rights of the Child (to which Argentine is a part) states that adolescents must be guaranteed, safe abortions and post-abortion care and, in addition, they have to be listened to," said Edurne Cardenas, a lawyer at the Center for Legal and Social Studies to Pagina 12.

The UNCRC serves to ensure that signatories of the Convention on the Rights of the Child are fulfilling the document.

The committee’s text says that "that Argentina must ensure access to safe abortion services and postabortion care for adolescent girls, guaranteeing that their opinions are always heard and duly taken into account as part of the decision-making process."

Under the current Argentine code, an impregnated adolescent between 13 and 16 has the right to decide their own "noninvasive" treatment that does not "compromise their state of health or provoke a serious risk to their lives or physical integrity."

Whether or not an abortion is considered "invasive" is still being debated in the house.

The committee says it doesn’t want to see Argentina continue to imprison 14-year-olds on the basis of an abortion and should stop "harassing children and adolescents with the security forces."