In early December, a delegation of U.S. state lawmakers visited the Dominican Republic as part of a trip organized by the State Innovation Exchange and the Women's Equality Center. I was one of a group of journalists and the only one working full-time in the United States.
Members of the National Assembly who attended this trip include New York congressmen Karins Reyes, Amanda Septimo, and Jessica González-Rojas (former executive director of the National Latina Reproductive Justice Institute), North Carolina Senator Natalie Murdoch, and Arizona Senator Anna. This was attended. Hernández.
We traveled to the Dominican Republic to learn about the consequences of the Caribbean country's total abortion ban. There are no exceptions, even in life and death situations. The law imposes prison sentences of up to two years for pregnant women who have or attempted abortions and five to 20 years for health care workers.
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Of course, many people find a way. Those with money can travel or pay for treatment at more permissive private clinics, and there are networks that help people obtain abortion pills. But this is a high-risk proposition. One nurse said public hospitals were monitored by police, who often arrested women with vaginal bleeding. (If you think that sounds like the direction many American states are heading, you'd be right.)
For decades, feminist activists in the Dominican Republic (one of whom said they were “the most hated women in the country”) have been fighting for “Las Tres Causales,” or three states of affairs. Abortion to preserve the life of the pregnant woman in cases of rape, incest, or fatal fetal diagnosis.
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Luis Abinader, president of the Dominican Republic since 2020, said he supported causality. But so far his administration has failed to deliver on its promise to reform criminal law. This inaction has sparked several protests, including a three-month camp near the National Palace in 2021.
Since the start of the trip last month, the attendance of U.S. lawmakers and the focus of their visit have attracted attention. “Estamos aquí para apoyar a las tres causales,” New York State Representative Amanda Septimo said during her first day meeting with Dominican lawmakers. “We are here to support three causes,” she said.
Those words mean more than you might think.
More than 1.1 million Dominicans live in the New York City metropolitan area, the largest population of Dominicans outside the Dominican Republic. Both Reyes and Septimo are Dominican-American, and both represent the part of the Bronx that now has the highest concentration of Dominican populations in New York City.
Many of these voters are dual citizens who are eligible to vote in Dominican elections. This dual citizen has long had a strong voting presence and is known to be actively involved in politics in New York and the Dominican Republic. Pressure from this population in support of causality may help a decades-long campaign finally succeed. And activists are working hard to make that happen.
For example, when Abinader visited New York last year to become grand marshal of the National Dominican Day Parade, advocates marched in the parade in support of las tres causation. They were decorated in green, the color representative of Latin America's abortion rights movement.
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So the remarks by New York lawmakers attracted a lot of attention in the local media. Apparently the U.S. Embassy in the Dominican Republic was not impressed.
When asked about the delegation's comments, U.S. Embassy spokesperson Gabrielle Hurst told Dominican news outlets: accent The U.S. government does not take a position on abortion abroad. Hearst also emphasized that the delegation: situation Because they are members of Congress and not members of the U.S. Congress, they do not represent the official position of the United States. This is an interesting comment, considering that individual members of the U.S. Congress routinely express personal opinions that do not represent the views of the federal government as a whole or the president.
Dominican activists are not even calling for full decriminalization of abortion. They're just trying to come up with policies to prevent pregnant people from dying. Sound familiar? The same fight is being fought in many states across the country and has already reached the U.S. Supreme Court. And here the Biden administration is on the health exemption side of the abortion ban.
Biden has also taken several steps to support abortion access abroad.
The global “gag rule,” first introduced by the Reagan administration in 1984, is a policy that prevents foreign groups that receive funding from the U.S. government from mentioning abortion. They cannot provide information about abortion to the people they serve, cannot refer them to abortion services, or engage in abortion-related advocacy. This is true even if they spent their own money from sources other than the U.S. government.
Since the Reagan era, this policy has been a political football. The Democratic President will abolish it. Republicans are bringing it back.
But when Donald Trump took office, he didn't stop at reinstating the rules. His administration expanded the rules. Instead of applying only to organizations that receive Planned Parenthood funding, the Trump administration expanded this policy to apply to all organizations that receive any type of U.S. global health assistance. This included funding for HIV and AIDs prevention, clean water, and preventing the spread of infectious diseases. Instead of affecting about $600 million in family planning funding as usual, as of 2018 the policy applied to about $12 billion in U.S. foreign aid.
In one of his first acts as president, Biden repealed the global gag rule. (He did, however, leave in place the Helms Amendment, which prohibits U.S. foreign aid funds from directly paying for abortion services.)
“It is my administration’s policy to support the sexual and reproductive health and rights of women and girls in the United States and around the world,” Biden said in the memorandum.
If that's true, he might want to call the U.S. Embassy in the Dominican Republic.