Chilean President Gabriel Boric announced on Saturday that he will propose a free abortion law during the second half of the year because, he said, "the women of Chile deserve their right to decide."
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"As president, I am convinced to give a democratic debate on sexual and reproductive rights and, although some male deputies object, during the second half of this year we will present a legal abortion bill," said Boric.
Chile decriminalized abortion in 2017, during the second term of former socialist president Michelle Bachelet, and approved a law that allows the voluntary termination of pregnancy on three grounds (risk to the mother, foetal infeasibility and rape), although feminist movements denounce that many obstacles to its implementation still persist.
Boric indicated that the Government entered a new regulation to "improve the application" of the law, which seeks "to ensure that people know their options, to ensure a right that is established by law, that conscientious objection does not hinder these three grounds and that the place where one lives and the capacity to pay are not a barrier."
Boric’s announcement this Saturday during his speech of accountability to the National Congress, in Valparaíso, 110 kilometers northwest of the capital, aroused strong applause among those attending the Public Account, but also boos by right-wing parliamentarians, who are currently the majority in Congress.
Since the passage of the "three-pronged law" in 2017, the debate to expand the law and approve free abortion has reopened from time to time, but the right opposes it head on and polls show that society is divided. The Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet was who criminalized abortion in 1990, shortly before leaving power.
The last attempt was made in 2022, when a proposal to change the Chilean Constitution, in force since the military dictatorship, proposed to guarantee free abortion in the constitution, but was rejected by the majority of citizens.