Law made, loophole found: the record number of abortions in 2024

This Monday, the official numbers were released confirming that in 2024, 11,232 abortions were performed in Uruguay, the highest figure recorded since the law was passed in 2012.

The current Deputy Secretary of Public Health, Leonel Briozzo (MPP) —who was dismissed from his position at the Pereira Rossell Women's Hospital in 2022 due to "irregularities" in the management of resources allocated to surgical interventions— attributed this increase to the "decline" in the teaching of comprehensive sex education (CSE) in educational institutions.

According to Briozzo, in recent years there has been a setback in the systematic and cross-cutting implementation of CSE, which raises questions within the cabinet about the effective enforcement of Law No. 18,426 on Sexual and Reproductive Health, which since 2008 has required the state to guarantee sex education as a right.

Briozzo emphasized that sex education is one of the main pillars for preventing unintended pregnancies, along with access to contraceptive methods and the promotion of sexual and reproductive rights. However, CSE is far from being a noble tool for raising awareness. Comprehensive sex education programs impose on our society ideas that go against biology and human nature through gender feminism.

One month after the death of the criminal José Mujica, let us recall one of the worst policies he implemented during his presidential term: the abortion law.

In 2009, under the first Frente Amplio government, the Office of Planning and Budget (OPP) published the report Towards a National Development Strategy, Uruguay 2050, which warned about the disastrous demographic scenario we are already experiencing. It also addressed how population aging in Uruguay, caused by low birth rates, posed major challenges for the economy, the labor market, the health system, education, and social protection.

Paradoxically, the strategy they devised to address national development was that, just three years later, Uruguay would become the second country in Latin America, after Cuba, to decriminalize abortion. Thus, under Mujica's administration —a great admirer of the Cuban dictatorship— Law No. 18,987 was enacted on October 22, 2012.

The abortion law, disguised under the name "Voluntary" Termination of Pregnancy (VTP), was promoted by Frente Amplio legislators. One of the main advocates was the ultra-feminist and socialist Mónica Xavier, current director of the National Institute for Women (Inmujeres). This way, abortion in Uruguay became a "right guaranteed by the state": that is, since 2012, all Uruguayans not only finance thousands of abortions, but also contribute to Uruguay's serious demographic crisis and its disastrous consequences.

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Abortion is not a topic that can be addressed lightly, since human life is at the center of the debate. The political decisions made by the relevant government agencies should require deeper reflection than those required by other cabinet departments.

The "object of study" of the Ministry of Transport and Public Works can never be equated with that of the Ministry of Public Health, simply because, broadly speaking, one deals with roads and the other with human life.

For this reason, it is unacceptable not to delve philosophically into the paradigms that govern public policies such as, for example, the fact that there is more talk of a Voluntary Termination of Pregnancy instead of an abortion. This semantic subtlety was already settled in 2020 by the Royal Spanish Academy, but the answer was unsatisfactory for the author.

Talking about VTP is to spray death with a macabre progressive perfume.

In response to the controversies caused by the use of the term, the RAE argued that termination can represent a pause. While this is semantically valid, it is not pragmatically so.

No one can deny that this zygote, embryo, or fetus has life from the very first moments. To abort means to end the life of a human being, not to "pause" or "interrupt" it. Calling this action a "termination" or "pause" is a very cynical way of disguising the truth, since in practice no one "pauses" a life as if it were a video. By this logic, one could assert the following absurdity: a homicide is the "voluntary termination" of another person's life. This is the degree of linguistic absurdity we have reached.

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It is possible that human fragility leads people to rationalize pain, to seek justifications that allow them to cope with situations as harsh as death, in any of its forms. Thus, around abortion, cold voices are naturally heard that reduce that life to a simple clot, a piece of flesh, or even pathological waste.

The truth is that it is the death of a human life and those who have enough emotional strength to face it, pay tribute to that being who, by the mother's will (there is no such thing as "pregnant people") or misfortunes of nature, will be unable to become a compatriot.