Boas Vindas! Portugal joins the free world by legalizing a woman's right to choose

This from the Portugal to legalize abortion, conservatives shaken - washingtonpost.com:

Under the current ban, women caught aborting can go to jail for up to three years.

When the ban is lifted, Portugal will join most European countries in allowing abortions, except a small group with strict abortion laws -- Malta, Ireland and Poland.

Liberals now hope other progressive laws can be passed as in neighboring Spain, such as allowing gay marriage.

The conservative camp, led by the head of Portugal's Catholic Democratic party, Jose Ribeiro e Castro, said this was a "sad chapter in Portugal's history" and blamed Socrates for insisting on a move that split Portuguese society.

More than half the traditionally Catholic nation's 8.7 million electorate abstained, but of those who voted in Sunday's referendum, 59.3 percent voted to lift the abortion ban and 40.8 percent to keep it.

Democracy cannot flourish if women do not have the right to exercising their free will. Anti-abortion laws are just another name for reproductive slavery.

A country is not conservative if it has laws denying women equal reproductive rights. Said country is a tyranny when it forces women --and for that matter families-- to take extreme measures when it comes to their free will.

Felicidades aos portugueses neste dia! Congratulations to the 59.3% of Portugal who believe personal religious beliefs ought not be use to undermine Democracy.

Welcome to the modern world.


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Lorraine's picture

Yeah

Amazing how these battles are being fought, over and over and over again. Thanks!


M. Loutre's picture

Okay, now wait a goshdarn minute here.

If this kind of stuff keeps on happening women will be in charge of their own bodies everywhere before too much longer, and *then* where will we be, huh??


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Who could have imagined that in the United States, with its independent judiciary, thousands of men could be rounded up in the night -- many only because of their Muslim religion or foreign nationality -- without recourse to a trial, without even an acknowledgment that they had been arrested? Who could have dared to suggest that there would ever be "desaparecidos" in America? And there it was as well, torture being discussed as a legitimate option to protect a community in peril, and then being used in Guantanamo and Afghanistan, and even obscenely photographed in Iraq -- yes, there they were again, the depressing echoes of my Chile.

But worse perhaps than all of this was the erosion of the moral compass of America, the seeming indifference of the seeming majority to the suffering of others, the casual acceptance of "collateral damage" as an unquestioned consequence of the war on "terrorism," the demonization of an ubiquitous foe who had to be destroyed without second thoughts -- and often without first ones as well; without, in fact, any thoughtfulness at all. That was far more terrifying than the criminal attacks on New York and Washington: To realize that the Chile of strongman Augusto Pinochet was not that far away, not that difficult to imitate, that it was already hovering in the future and ready to materialize if we were not vigilant.


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