The Guatemalan navy on Thursday dispatched a vessel to watch over a Dutch “abortion ship” carrying activists vowing to help women circumvent the nation’s longstanding prohibition on terminating pregnancies.
“The military will not permit this group to carry out its activities in the country,” the military said in a formal complaint to the prosecutor’s office issued on instructions from Guatemalan President Jimmy Morales.
The group, Women on Waves, said in a statement that their sailing ship was being “detained” illegally by the military, which it accused of “obstructing a lawful protest against the state’s restrictions on the Guatemalan women’s right to safe abortion.”
Photo: AFP
The arrival of the Dutch-registered ship in the port of San Jose, south of the Guatemalan capital, prompted fierce protests by Christian groups.
They disrupted a news conference by the activists, who counted 10 people from Brazil, Austria, Germany, the Netherlands, Spain and Guatemala.
“They say they are fighting for life and human rights, but it looks like murder has become a human right,” said Gil Hernandez, a seminary student from Cuba.
Port officials have ordered the activists to stay on board their ship, saying they had not declared the motive of their trip and therefore could not go ashore.
The group has pledged to offer abortions in international waters just off Guatemala’s coast over the next five days.
Abortion is allowed in Guatemala only in cases where the mother’s life is in danger.
According to Women on Waves, about 65,000 illegal and unsafe abortions take place in the Central American nation every year. Set up in 1999, Women on Waves has generated controversy with its abortion ships in the past.
Founder Rebecca Gomberts confirmed that the Guatemala trip was the first since a 2012 campaign in Morocco, when the Moroccan navy blocked a harbor to prevent the group’s ship from docking.
For its mission to Central America, the organization said in a statement: “The ship can provide women with free legal medical abortions till 10 weeks of pregnancy after sailing to international waters, 12 miles [19.3km] outside Guatemala.”
Gomberts said the plan was to pick up five women at a time by dinghy and take them to the ship waiting outside Guatemalan waters.
Abortions would be induced with two pills. Counseling, treatment and aftercare would also be available for women seeking the group’s services.
An Austrian doctor on board, Christian Fiala, said the abortion by pills was 99 percent safe and approved by the WHO.
In past years, a Women on Waves ship has also visited Ireland, Poland, Portugal and Spain, prompting protests by pro-life groups in each country.
POLITICAL PRISONERS VS DEPORTEES: Venezuela’s prosecutor’s office slammed the call by El Salvador’s leader, accusing him of crimes against humanity Salvadoran President Nayib Bukele on Sunday proposed carrying out a prisoner swap with Venezuela, suggesting he would exchange Venezuelan deportees from the US his government has kept imprisoned for what he called “political prisoners” in Venezuela. In a post on X, directed at Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro, Bukele listed off a number of family members of high-level opposition figures in Venezuela, journalists and activists detained during the South American government’s electoral crackdown last year. “The only reason they are imprisoned is for having opposed you and your electoral fraud,” he wrote to Maduro. “However, I want to propose a humanitarian agreement that
ECONOMIC WORRIES: The ruling PAP faces voters amid concerns that the city-state faces the possibility of a recession and job losses amid Washington’s tariffs Singapore yesterday finalized contestants for its general election on Saturday next week, with the ruling People’s Action Party (PAP) fielding 32 new candidates in the biggest refresh of the party that has ruled the city-state since independence in 1965. The move follows a pledge by Singaporean Prime Minister Lawrence Wong (黃循財), who took office last year and assumed the PAP leadership, to “bring in new blood, new ideas and new energy” to steer the country of 6 million people. His latest shake-up beats that of predecessors Lee Hsien Loong (李顯龍) and Goh Chok Tong (吳作棟), who replaced 24 and 11 politicians respectively
Archeologists in Peru on Thursday said they found the 5,000-year-old remains of a noblewoman at the sacred city of Caral, revealing the important role played by women in the oldest center of civilization in the Americas. “What has been discovered corresponds to a woman who apparently had elevated status, an elite woman,” archeologist David Palomino said. The mummy was found in Aspero, a sacred site within the city of Caral that was a garbage dump for more than 30 years until becoming an archeological site in the 1990s. Palomino said the carefully preserved remains, dating to 3,000BC, contained skin, part of the
Young women standing idly around a park in Tokyo’s west suggest that a giant statue of Godzilla is not the only attraction for a record number of foreign tourists. Their faces lit by the cold glow of their phones, the women lining Okubo Park are evidence that sex tourism has developed as a dark flipside to the bustling Kabukicho nightlife district. Increasing numbers of foreign men are flocking to the area after seeing videos on social media. One of the women said that the area near Kabukicho, where Godzilla rumbles and belches smoke atop a cinema, has become a “real
RSS