Derecho Latinoamericano

I'd like to report some fascinating facts that were disclosed in a not-so-fascinating class today. It was "Introduccion al Derecho Latinoamericano," and today, the professor decided to talk about abortion. I thought it a strange next step after last week's blah topics of Argentina's Constitution and the Civil Code, but it is a very heated issue all over the world and can certainly keep the attention of an audience of spaced-out kids. In Latin America, a fetus is a "persona" and has the associated right to life. Therefore, in Argentina, a woman is allowed a legal abortion only in three specific cases:

1) A mentally disabled woman becomes pregnant as a result of a violation to her body (rape). So a woman like me, being of sane mind, could not get a legal abortion after having been raped.

2) The fetus endangers the life of the mother.

3) The fetus has no chance at a healthy, semi-comfortable life.

The professor told us that the simple question every nation has to ask itself when forming abortion laws is this: Is an unborn fetus a person with rights equal to those of an adult, property of the mother, or just a group of cells? Answering this question, however, is slightly more complicated.

I once read an interesting take on abortion in the book "Freakonomics." Police forces saw an uncomfortable spike in violent crime in the seventies. The eighties saw an even bigger jump. Researchers expected violent crime to skyrocket in the nineties, but it didn't. In fact, it dropped slightly! Why? The unpopular view this book was postulating: Roe v. Wade. Children born to unprepared families in the seventies who statistically would go on to commit violent crimes about twenty years later WERE NEVER BORN! Some people who have babies have NO business raising kids because they're not prepared to adequately nurture them. I wonder if legalizing abortions can contribute to the health of a society.