Eva Barrionuevo, a doctor on the frontlines in Argentina: ‘We know that abortion rights don’t last forever and we will have to fight for them’

Doctor Eva Barrionuevo, 39, says there are women in her northeastern Argentinian province of La Rioja who think abortion is no longer legal. Women who believe that it has been banned by President Javier Milei, because they heard him equate the voluntary termination of pregnancy with “aggravated murder.” That they are coming to her hospital later and later in their pregnancies, some of them already in their second trimester, due to a lack of information. That they have once again turned to the clandestine drugs that were widely used before abortion was legal, which are less effective and more dangerous than those distributed free of charge by today’s healthcare system. Every day, Barrionuevo fights back against these misconceptions and the growing fear among her fellow doctors who also accompany voluntary pregnancy terminations. It is her mission to guarantee a woman’s right to decide whether she will become a mother, a right that was officially won at the end of 2020 in her country, but is now at risk.

Barrionuevo’s home province has a population of less than 400,000 and extends over an area of nearly 35,000 square miles, making it roughly the same size as Maine. The Catholic Church’s powerful influence was reflected in the final tallies of its votes to legalize abortion on December 30, 2020: of the three senators from La Rioja, one voted against the bill and the other two were marked absent from the vote entirely. The new legislation landed like a bomb in a country that in public, spoke out loudly against abortion, but in private, secretly terminated pregnancies.

The doctor, whose parents were political prisoners during the Argentinian dictatorship, is used to struggle. Barrionuevo says that at first, it was not easy to guarantee the right to legal abortions within the public health system. Many obstetrician-gynecologists declared themselves conscientious objectors, and the responsibility for carrying out the procedures fell to family physicians, or doctors with other specialties, like Barrionuevo herself, who is a cardiologist by training. In 2021, just a few months after legalization, Barrionuevo had been trained to carry out abortions via manual vacuum aspiration, but officials at the La Rioja hospital where she worked came up with excuse after excuse to prevent her from doing so. Until one day she improvised. With the help of another doctor and a psychologist, she locked herself in a small hospital office with a patient who wanted an abortion. While they performed the procedure, a group of their coworkers banged on the windows, lobbing insults and attempting to force the door open.

“The doctor stood in the doorway to keep them from entering and the psychologist tried to keep the patient calm. From the other side of the door, they told us that if there were any complications, no one would help us. There was an anesthetist yelling that if he was on duty, any curettages would have to be done without anesthesia,” Barrionuevo remembers. “But we kept going. We thought that if we let them intimidate us that time, they’d never leave us alone again.” Little by little, the procedure found acceptance — until Milei became president, and everything went into reverse.

“The government’s violent rhetoric has once again emboldened anti-rights groups everywhere, leading them to judge women who decide to end their pregnancy and intimidating those who support them,” says Barrionuevo, who is a member of the Network of Professionals for the Right to Choose.

Threats and medicine shortages

Problems are emerging across all provinces, in increasing numbers. A year ago, Milei’s political party presented a bill to repeal abortion rights, though it was later withdrawn amid claims that a member of parliament had presented the initiative without proper consultation. Months later, the federal government stopped providing abortion drugs, claiming that it was up to provincial governments to buy them, which forced many women to visit multiple hospitals in search of a procedure that none could provide. At the entrances of some hospitals, unauthorized checkpoints have been reported that seek to dissuade pregnant women from having abortions, utilizing false information. Inside the facilities, obstacles to having abortions are once again on the rise and the staff that help to provide them have faced abuse and threats.

Budget cuts in healthcare are making the situation even worse. The national government has limited the distribution of contraceptives, putting at risk sexual health and the prevention of teenage pregnancies and those of women in vulnerable situations, including those who live in provinces that have fewer resources to cover the expenses associated with the procedure.

Professionals like Barrionuevo have come together online to form a collective resistance against the attacks and to support one another: “We’re not going to give up,” she says. “We will continue with our banners held high and we will demonstrate on International Women’s Day in the streets, because we know that rights don’t last forever and that we will have to fight for them.”

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