High school students were among the protagonists of the movilizations for the right to the voluntary interruption of pregnancy in Argentina. Some student council delegates had the opportunity to present their arguments before the legislators in the lower house who formed part of the plenary session of committees that had to decide upon a bill.
Sofía Zibecchi, student council president at the Federico García Lorca high school, warned the congresspeople that efforts were being made to keep teenagers out of the debate, “but we girls are the ones who accompany our friends and schoolmates when they have to abort. We are the ones who saw their fear when they learned of the pregnancy, and who saw them endanger their lives so as to not carry it forward.”
Another participant in the debate was Ofelia Fernández, a former student council president from the Carlos Pellegrini high school. From her perspective, adults deal with the sexuality of adolescents “when we get pregnant, and not to offer us tools but instead to order us, as we’ve done all our lives, to obey a social mandate, our presumed destiny: to become mothers.”
The girls spoke at Congress and demanded #LegalAbortionNow. This video that we co-produced with the student organization Coordinadora de Estudiantes de Base (CEB), Latfem, Turma and Vosque distills the experience of demanding the right to abort in the streets.