In Argentina as in the US abortion is difficult or impossible to get.

María was 23 when she decided to have an abortion.

At the health centre where she had gone for treatment, she says she overheard one doctor saying to a colleague: “When will these girls learn to keep their legs closed?”

It’s always the girls who have to keep their legs closed, not the boys who have to keep their dicks in their pants.

María lives in Salta, a religiously conservative province in north-west Argentina, where many healthcare workers are still against abortion. She was eventually given a pill to end her pregnancy, but she says the nurses were reluctant to treat her and wanted to make her feel guilty: “After I expelled the pregnancy tissue, I could see the foetus.”

“The nurses put it in a jar to make sure I saw it and they told me, ‘This could have been your child.'”

It could have been, and so what? If you don’t want to have a child then you don’t want to. It’s the kind of thing you ought to want to do in order to do it well, because the consequences of doing it badly are so awful. Child-having of all the things humans do ought to be passionately voluntary.

Argentina relaxed its law on abortion in 2020, allowing a woman to choose to terminate her pregnancy in the first 14 weeks, Previously, it was only allowed in the case of rape or if the woman’s life or health was at risk.

Argentina is more liberal on abortion than the US.