Reminder To Progressives: Abortion Is An Economic Issue

[delisen]

14. When the Left exchanges Rights of Women for Easy Power Path

and economic gains for others it is a betrayal of us all. What is the net gain for humankind when the Left condemns your girls and women to a life of fear and poverty in exchange for advantage for others. Lets look at the Lesson of Nicaragua. Women fought the revolution but eventually lost their rights through political deals with the Right Wing.

Women's rights are human rights not a political wedge issue. We need to be vigilant on the Left and stop the downgrading of our human rights now.

Daniel Ortega won his third term as president of Nicaragua with his wife Rosario Murillo as vp. How did the former Sandinista revolutionary leader and his revolutionary hero wife accomplish this-by making a deal with the regressive forces and Catholic Church hierarchy to sell out the human rights of girls and women.

http://msmagazine.com/blog/2011/11/04/five-more-years-of-ortega-may-be-dangerous-for-nicaraguan-women/

Nicaragua’s human-rights defenders face an ongoing battle to respond to the needs of so many women and girls. “Programmes that we had … for women and girls’ protection with previous government are no longer implemented,” says Juanita Jiménez Martínez, lawyer for the Autonomous Women’s Movement (MAM), one of the country’s leading feminist organizations.
In the past, the national police worked jointly with [women’s] organizations on gender based violence. But now they’re encouraged to work ‘for the family,’ to preserve the family… This means less protection for women, more authority for men. […] This is a step backwards.

Girls under 17 represent around two-thirds of reported rapes in Nicaragua, and actual incidents are probably much higher, as many girls only report the crime when they fall pregnant by their attacker. Those victims who might have sought an abortion until 2006 now often feel pushed to take devastating measures. “In 2008, the maternal mortality statistics showed high suicide rates,” says Major. “The biggest killer of teenage girls who were pregnant was poison.”

Why is Nicaragua, with a strong feminist movement and some of the most progressive legislation in the region, letting down the female population so badly?

Firstly, there is a powerful, conservative element in the country that lobbied in 2006 for the all-out ban on abortion, gaining exceptional and lasting influence in policy making. Jiménez Martínez also points to allegations in the late 1990s that Ortega had committed years of sexual abuse against his stepdaughter, Zoilamérica Narváez. ‘To talk about sexual abuse in Nicaragua is to talk against Daniel Ortega,” she told me. Members of the women’s movement rallied around Narváez at the time, and since Ortega took the 2006 presidency, women and girls’ rights have dropped off the agenda and women’s organizations have been subjected to arbitrary state scrutiny and smear campaigns in state-owned media.

http://pulitzercenter.org/reporting/nicaragua-abortion-ban-and-right-choose

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2011/nov/03/daniel-ortega-nicaragua-election