The report of this bill for second debate will be put to a vote at the table on Wednesday, January 12
The voluntary interruption of pregnancy due to rape will not be a right, as resolved by the Legislature’s Justice Commission with votes, when reformulating the title of the bill that awaits the second and final debate of the bill before the plenary session of the National Assembly.
At the level of the legislative table, a heated debate was registered on January 11, and the division that exists between the same banks such as Pachakutik, Democratic Left and Union for Hope was reflected regarding the content of the project whose final text will be voted on Wednesday January 13th.
Until 5:00 p.m., the Justice commission did not address the most controversial issue of the project, which refers to temporality.
Until what week will abortion be allowed in cases of rape? National Assembly will define that time in debate of the bill
The discussion centered on the title of the law, and they started from the questioning made by legislators Ricardo Vanegas (Pachakutik) and Sofí Espín (UNES), that a right cannot be established, and they pointed out that this does not establish the ruling of the April 2021 cutoff.
Vanegas said that the Court’s ruling does not speak of a law that guarantees the right to abortion due to rape, so the legislature should focus on developing a law on termination of pregnancy due to rape. “Abortion cannot be a right, what the Court did is to decriminalize the crime of abortion in case of rape, but the crime continues to exist.”
Legislator Sofía Espín commented that abortion for rape should not have the quality of law in the Ecuadorian legal system, without ignoring that the Constitutional Court, through a judgment of April 2021, decriminalized abortion for all cases when the pregnancy is the product of a violation.
In Ecuador, he added, the catalog of rights does not grant abortion for violation the quality of right, and moreover, the CC in its ruling explicitly stated that its ruling did not discuss the constitutionality or not of consensual abortion, but rather the proportionality of criminalization of voluntary abortion in the case of women victims of rape. The Court did not decriminalize abortion, but one of its causes.
He insisted that neither the Constitution nor the ruling of the Constitutional Court nor current legislation determine that there is a right to voluntary interruption of pregnancy in the event of rape, therefore, he stated that the word right should be excluded.
Its co-leader Gissela Garzón, alternate of Fausto Jarrín, said that if we are talking about rights, article 66 of the Constitution should be taken into account, which recognizes and guarantees people the right to make free, responsible and informed decisions about their reproductive health and life and deciding when and how many children to have. And he stated that based on this, the title of the law would have to be defined.
The draft of the project that was discussed at the table was called: “organic law to guarantee the right to voluntary interruption of pregnancy in case of rape.”
After a debate, the UNES legislator, Gisela Garzón, moved that the project should be titled: organic law that guarantees the voluntary interruption of pregnancy of girls, adolescents and women in case of rape.
That motion had the support of nine assembly members: Alejandro Jaramillo and Johanna Moreira (ID), Dina Farinango, Ricardo Vanegas and Segundo Chimbo (PK), José Agualsaca, Sofía Espín, Yhajaira Urresta and Gissela Garzón (UNES). The legislator Dalton Bacigalupo (ID) spoke against it. (I)
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