The answer to the question of whether human life should be accorded the same value and dignity at all stages of development is the answer of the American Convention on Human Rights (Pact of San José), which was signed and ratified by the Dominican Republic in 1978. The Dominican State undertook, in article 4, paragraph 1, of this legal text, to the following: “Everyone has the right to have his life respected. This right is protected by law and generally from the moment of conception. No one can be arbitrarily deprived of his life. When the Inter-American Legislature drafted Article 4 of the American Convention on Human Rights, it granted the status of a fundamental human right and established the obligation for member states to protect that fundamental right from the moment of conception. The only mechanism that Member States such as the Dominican Republic have put in place to protect human life that is already sick and exists in a woman`s womb is to ban and criminalise abortion. In the Dominican Republic, international human rights conventions have constitutional status in accordance with Supreme Court resolution 1920-2003 of 13 November 2003. However, in 1969, the Dominican Republic signed the United Nations Convention on the Law of Treaties (Vienna Convention), in which it undertook, in article 27, to give international treaties a higher hierarchy than national legislation, and established this legal text, which prohibits Member States from relying on their national legislation to justify non-compliance with their international law. Obligations to be invoked. The American Convention on Human Rights is supplemented in the Dominican Republic by the International Convention on the Rights of the Child, which enshrines in Article 6 the right to life of every child, and by the Dominican Constitution itself, which establishes the protection of human life in Article 8(1). The Dominican Civil Code, in its article 725, stipulates as a prerequisite for succession that inheritance exists at the time of the opening of the inheritance, that is, a begotten person is a member of an inheritance and cannot be excluded from it, so that our Dominican civil system grants embryos and foetuses the category of human persons. with inheritance law. It is not surprising that human life is protected by the legislator from the moment of conception and that this principle does not allow for exceptions.
The right to life is transferred from natural to positive law, and it is not a far-fetched expression to establish that the living human organism is politically and legally endowed with the inalienable right to life at the time of conception. On this basis, the right to life of unborn children (right not to be aborted, not to be cloned, not to experiment with their embryonic cells) is guaranteed by our laws. In 1971, Alice Schwarzer published an article in Stern magazine in which 374 women confessed to having terminated a pregnancy, including Romy Schneider. This prompted thousands of women to take to the streets to protest against the right to vote. In 1976, the social-liberal coalition approved the decriminalization of abortion for the reasons of the first three months of pregnancy. Abortion remains totally banned in the Dominican Republic after the failure on Thursday (16.12.2021) of a decisive vote in the Chamber of Deputies, during which a new penal code was to be adopted. Worldwide, there are an average of 56 million abortions annually. Abortion is only allowed to save the woman`s life. Misoprostol est.
“Lawmakers in the Dominican Republic have a historic opportunity to reform the country`s archaic penal code and decriminalize abortion in three circumstances,” said Ximena Casas, women`s rights researcher at Human Rights Watch. “Women and girls in the Dominican Republic have long waited for the authorities to defend their lives and their sexual and reproductive rights. Over the past two decades, a new penal code has been discussed with proposals that allow abortion on grounds such as health risk, rape or fetal malformations, but ultra-conservative groups in Congress have managed to maintain abortion restrictions in the country. The work of human rights groups, and in particular the feminist movement, is necessary to move forward with legislation that will one day guarantee free access to abortion in the Dominican Republic. Groups working to decriminalize abortion in the Dominican Republic have proposed decriminalizing abortion in four scenarios: (Washington D.C.) – Congress of the Dominican Republic should pass a proposal to decriminalize abortion in three circumstances, Human Rights Watch said today. The total ban on abortion, in force since 1884, threatens the health and lives of pregnant women and is incompatible with the Dominican Republic`s international human rights obligations. Research shows that people who need an abortion do so regardless of whether the law allows it or not (Guttmacher 2020). This pushes people to seek out clandestine procedures, which seriously endangers their health and lives. Cytotec/Misoprostol/Misodel.
Pharmacies sell prescription drugs and approve drug control because they are used to treat other conditions beyond abortion. Due to restrictive access to abortion, the data underestimates the number of women who have an abortion: 9.8% of pregnant women ended up in some kind of abortion in 2013, according to ENDESA. Abortion is the fifth leading cause of maternal death, accounting for 13%. Taking advantage of the fact that we have raised the issue of maternal mortality, we must point out that the sectors that promote the decriminalization of abortion claim that one way to reduce maternal mortality would be to legalize abortion in order to avoid the death of mothers as a result of illegal abortions. It is interesting to note that a study carried out in 1999 by the World Health Organization, UNICEF and the World Bank established as recommendations the following measures to reduce the mortality of pregnant mothers (the legalization of abortion is not one of these measures): Abortion is illegal. The law makes an exception to save a woman`s life in certain circumstances. Abortion is illegal in the Dominican Republic in all circumstances, even if the life of the pregnant woman or girl is in danger, according to the country`s penal code, which was last updated in 2007.