Puerto Rican Senate passes bill banning abortion after 22 weeks.
null / Credit: UnsplashBill 693, which prohibits abortion on the island beyond 22 weeks with a few exceptions, was approved by the Puerto Rican Senate on June 22.
“Passed! Senate Bill 693 has just been approved with 16 votes in favor, nine against, one abstention, and one absent,” Sen. Joanne Rodríguez Veve, president of the Puerto Rican Senate’s Committee on Life and Family Affairs, told ACI Prensa, CNA’s Spanish-language sister news agency.
The law, which is now headed to the House of Representatives, was primarily written by Rodriguez.
The Puerto Rico governor will be required to sign it if it is approved there.
The text of the legislation’s Article 2 states that “the Commonwealth of Puerto Rico declares that a licensed medical professional will not carry out a termination of pregnancy where the one conceived is in the gestational stage of viability, as defined in this law.”
The Roe v. Wade ruling, which legalized abortion in 1973, was still in effect on the day the bill was passed since Puerto Rico is an unincorporated part of the United States; however, this is no longer the case after Roe was overturned on June 24.
On the island, abortion has been permitted throughout pregnancy.
The senator stated during her testimony before the Senate on June 22 that she identifies as a woman “with the vast majority of Puerto Rican women who, if they could, would be here, in front of this microphone, as the voice of babies in the womb, over five and a half months in gestation, which the Senate Bill 693 wants to protect.”
While supporting Bill 693, the senator emphasized that even though she “believes in the defense of life from conception.”
This is because Bill 693 “recognizes that the right to privacy of women is not absolute, but rather finds limits compared to other rights, such as the right to life expressly recognized in our Constitution.”
The senator emphasized that she was speaking as a “woman entrenched in the moral fabric of this people who sows life in the earth and preserves life in the womb” after pointing out that people born at 22, 23, 24, and 27 weeks were present during the debate. I am a lady who celebrates life and laments death today.
“Democracy must never be at the service of death. And today it is up to us, through the democratic exercise of the vote, but above all, from the breadth of our hearts, to defend the lives of those who cannot do it for themselves,” she concluded.