Can you have women’s rights without abortion rights?
Damaris Abarca is a Chilean chess master who has been honing her strategy with knights and bishops since she was a child. She has won four national championships since 2010, emerging as one of the top players in Latin America.
Today, the 30-something is determined to transfer her skills from the chessboard to another complicated arena – politics. She sits at the center of a historic effort in Chile to ease the country’s strict abortion laws.
The leap between the worlds of rooks and reproductive rights isn’t all that far, according to the first female president of the Chilean Chess Federation. She once cited the queen, or “la dama” in Spanish, in an opinion piece to justify Chilean women’s right to choose, which had been taken away during the dictatorship of Augusto Pinochet. “She is the most powerful player ... able to move freely across the board,” Ms. Abarca wrote.
Now Chile, which currently criminalizes abortion except in three strict cases, could legalize the procedure in all circumstances in the first trimester – and Ms. Abarca could be a major player in that change. The Olympic chess competitor and mother of one sits on a constituent assembly rewriting Chile’s Constitution. The assembly is composed of equal representation of men and women and could ultimately enshrine reproductive rights in the charter.
“Many women [in the constitutional assembly] share feminist proposals, one being sexual and reproductive rights to pave the way for legal abortion,” says Ms. Abarca, a leader in the assembly’s fundamental rights committee.
Chile’s possible loosening of abortion restrictions mirrors a trend in much of the rest of the world. While people in the United States are preoccupied with the prospect of the Supreme Court rolling back access to abortions that American women secured in the 1973 Roe v. Wade decision, many countries are liberalizing their abortion laws.
Over the past three decades, 60 countries have loosened restrictions, while three have tightened abortion access – Nicaragua,
