"In six years, we have answered more than 25,000 calls of women asking for advice on how to carry out a safe abortion at home, we have compiled public information about it, and produced a guide… through several campaigns we have set on the agenda the abortion as an issue to be discussed not in moralistic terms, but as a gender rights issue and as a public health problem in Chile,” states Mafe Barrera who works for Safe Abortion Phone Line (Línea Aborto Seguro), an autonomous initiative that has been providing information on how to use misotrol safely since 2009..
Linea Aborto Seguro operates from Concepcion, a town in the South of Chile, in one of the most restrictive environments in the world in terms of sexual and reproductive rights. The current Chilean legislation dates from the Pinochet dictatorship which abolished the article 119 of the Health Code in 1989, and makes Chile one of the four countries in the world that prohibits interruption of a pregnancy under any circumstances. Despite this severe prohibition, thousands of abortions are performed every year clandestinely in the country. Due to the lack of regulation, the data is incomplete, but numbers range from 33.830 hospital admissions after abortion in 2014 according to the National Health Service (SNS) registry, to 70.000 clandestine abortions calculated by the University Diego Portales, and between 120.000-160.000 abortions according to data included in the report to CEDAW in 2013.
Some of these abortions are carried out on children. According to the official data highlighted by Doctor Guillermo Galan and the organization Miles, in 2014, 72 girls under 14 became pregnant as a result of a sexual violence, and around 1000 girls under 15 fall pregnant in Chile every year. "Many of them are pregnant because of rapes or after incestuous relationships with their stepfathers… we owe it to them to take action, and we have to do something urgently. Just for this reason alone it would be worthwhile to adopt the bill proposed by the Executive", states Dr Galan, a gynaecologist who has worked in sexual and reproductive health for more than 40 years, and one of the increasing medical voices now speaking out openly about this issue in Chile.
