By José Manzaneda on September 27, 2023
The counterrevolution, together with certain religious groups on the Island, is trying to put an end to the sexual and reproductive rights conquered by Cuban women, as they tried, in 2021, with the new Family Code, which protects family diversity, egalitarian marriage and many other rights.
In 1961, after the Triumph of the Revolution, Cuba became the first country in Latin America and the Caribbean to decriminalize abortion.
Today, it is practiced under three principles: the decision belongs exclusively to the woman, it is performed in public hospitals by specialized personnel, and it is absolutely free. It only becomes a crime when it is performed for profit, without the woman’s consent or in conditions that may threaten her health or life.
In the 1950s, the practice of abortion in Cuba was similar to that of many countries in the region today: while in high society it was performed safely and confidentially, poor women died. The number of maternal deaths from unsafe abortions was more than 60 per 100,000 births, something that, in a few years, was reduced to almost zero.
But the right to abortion, as a historical conquest of Cuban women, is attacked by the counterrevolution and its media. Using, for this purpose, the most abject lies.
“Abortion in Cuba is as easy as ‘pulling teeth”, was the shocking headline of a report in the Spanish newspaper ABC, written by Camila Acosta, a Cuban mercenary journalist who receives part of her contributions, which she offers to the newspaper Cubanet, from US federal funds.
Her source: well-known “dissidents”, today living outside the island. For example, Óscar Elías Biscet, a Cuban ex-prisoner and anti-abortionist doctor, who ABC presents as a “devout Christian” and “human rights activist”. Biscet assures that, in Cuba, in order to keep the infant mortality rate low – listen well here – pressure is put on “women with supposedly problematic pregnancies to interrupt them, often just before delivery”.
Another source, curiously, assigns this allegedly criminal practice another objective. María Werlau, daughter of one of the invaders killed at the Bay of Pigs and today director of the Cuba Archive in Miami, assures that, in Cuba – hold on – women “with high-risk pregnancies are systematically pressured (…) to have abortions”. And for what? So that “their fetuses can be used in experiments and transplants”, which “could hide a network of international trafficking of human organs and tissues”. Folks, agree: is it to cheat on the mortality rate or to traffic in fetuses?
Even to “keep down” the infant mortality rate in Cuba, there would be a sinister policy of murdering babies with problems at birth, which would be camouflaged as abortions. Oscar Elias Biscet’s story seems to be taken out of a macabre novel by Howard Lovecraft: a mother assured him -listen carefully- that her newborn was “wrapped in a paper cartridge until it died”; and another one, that her baby was murdered by introducing it “into a bucket of water”.
The counterrevolution, together with certain religious groups on the island, are trying to put an end to the sexual and reproductive rights won by Cuban women, as they tried to do in 2021 with the new Family Code, which protects family diversity, egalitarian marriage and many other rights.
For this, as in so many other issues, such as “political prisoners”, “torture” or “slave doctors”, they use the most aberrant and monstrous lies, spread by the international media scoundrels.
Source: Cuba en Resumen