Less than a week after their president declared Guatemala the "pro-life capital" of Latin America, the country's lawmakers Tuesday shelved a bill that would have imposed up to 10 years of jail time for women who obtained abortions.
President Alejandro Giammattei on March 9 celebrated Guatemala's Congress passing the "Protection of Life and Family" law.
"This event is an invitation to unite as Guatemalans to protect life from conception until natural death,” Giammattei said during a speech that day at the National Palace, The Washington Post.
The next day, however, the president said the legislation violated two international conventions to which Guatemala was a signatory, as well as the nation's constitution. He did not specify which provisions were in violation.
After Giammattei said he would veto the bill, congress dropped the law.
Besides protests and legal challenges to the law, the U.S. government expressed serious concerns about enacting the legislation, which also banned same-sex marriage, in back-channel conversations with the Guatemalan government, The New York Times reported.
The bill would have imposed among the harshest penalties for abortion of any country in Latin America and would have prohibited teaching students about sexual diversity or that gay or lesbian sex is "normal,” and barred schools from discussing LGBTQ issues with children, the Times said.
Abortion is illegal in Guatemala in every case except when a woman’s life is at risk.
"Guatemala has been an outlier in how evidently and how the political authorities have been so outspoken in terms of defending life," Catholic News Agency Executive Director Alejandro Bermudez told EWTN.
He added that the pro-abortion lobby was a formidable force in Latin American countries, such as Colombia, which last month legalized abortion up until 24 weeks of a pregnancy.
"There is a systematic targeting country-by-country by the international pro-abortion lobby — that’s a fact," Bermudez told EWTN. "Obviously, we Catholics have not been sufficiently prepared, at least in Argentina, which was the major target. Mexico continues to be a target and Columbia was the next one. And they found that it was impossible to legalize abortion through the Congress and Senate because it's a pro-life country.
"So, they decided, for many years, to influence in how the members of the constitutional court, what would be the Supreme Court, were chosen."
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