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President-Elect of Argentina Defends Pro-Abortion Position and Favors "Sexual Choice"

By Matthew Cullinan Hoffman

BUENOS AIRES, October 30, 2007 (LifeSiteNews.com) - The President-Elect of Argentina, Cristina Fernández de Kirchner, recently claimed to be "opposed to abortion", but her attempts to clarify her statement seem to affirm her party's pro-legalization position.

"I have always defined myself as being against abortion" she said in a radio interview days before the national presidential election, held on October 28th. However, using rhetoric that is common among pro-abortion politicians in the United States, she clarified that "I don't think anyone is in favor of abortion" and added, "I don't believe that those who advocate the decriminalization of abortion are in favor of abortion. That would be an oversimplification."

Fernandez also stated her concern about the "stigmatization" of those who are in favor of legalization, decrying the idea "that someone is in favor of abortion and then because I'm not in favor of it I stigmatize them."  She contrasted this view with her own, remarking that "I have a lot of respect for others' opinions."

In the same interview, Fernández also appeared to support civil union legislation for homosexual couples, stating that she favors "freedom of sexual choice for all of the men and women of Argentina", and reportedly calling same-sex relations "normal". Homosexual union legislation would be possible she said, although she eschewed responsibility for it, asserting that "it will be a topic that the Parliament will debate.  It isn't a matter that should be debated within the executive branch."

Fernández, who won over 40% of the vote in Sunday's election, is a senator and member of the leftist Peronist party, which has a record of favoring abortion and promoting contraceptive use. She is also the wife of the current president of Argentina, Nestor Kirchner, whose health minister is emphatically pro-abortion. Her husband's administration recently intervened in a well-reported case of a retarded woman impregnated by a relative, flying the woman to another Argentine province when doctors in her own province refused to perform an abortion on ethical and medical grounds (see recent LifeSiteNews coverage at http://www.lifesitenews.com/ldn/2007/oct/07100102.html).

Fernández, who has been criticized for her "frivolous" and "snooty" attitudes and lack of competence, is sometimes compared to Eva Perón, Argentina's popular young first lady of the 1940s and 50s, although Fernández is two decades older than Peron was when she died in 1952. Time magazine has called her a "political fashion plate".

The conservative on-line publication Hispanidad remarked, shortly before her election, that "the ultimate demonstration of the frivolousness of Cristina de Kirchner consists in always defending her position against abortion, when her spouse and her party have done everything possible to introduce abortion into Argentina through the back door." 

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