PETER EISNER:
South America is overwhelmingly Catholic and abortion is generally illegal, but most countries allow exceptions for rape, and in cases involving the health of mother and fetus. For most of the 20th century, Chile also allowed those exceptions. That changed in 1989 at the end of General Augusto Pinochet's 27- year dictatorship. Pinochet issued a decree banning all abortions. Chile is now one of four countries in the Americas that prohibit all abortions for any reason — a topic little discussed in the years since until the case of the 11 year-old made national news. In a round-about way, that case shone a spotlight on practices that have been going on for years in Chile but are rarely acknowledged in public. Despite the total ban on all abortions the government usually looks the other way for affluent or well-connected women if a physician determines there is a medical reason for the procedure. Doctors perform about 30,000 such abortions every year and sometimes falsify records to say they had performed appendectomies or other procedures instead. And by most estimates there are another 120,000 elective abortions done every year.
This woman's story illustrates that statistic. Francisca, a 30-year-old woman who lives in Santiago, says she became pregnant after her doctor told her to stop taking birth control pills due to a circulatory problem. She spoke in shadow because she would be subject to arrest if indentified. More than 100 people were charged with having an abortion or helping to provide an abortion in 2012, and more than 400 women and men, are currently in jail or on probation on such charges.
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