International

A year on from Argentine abortion law, change is slow

AFP

A year ago Argentina joined the limited ranks of Latin American countries to have legalized abortion, but while that gave hope to millions of women, changing mentalities, practices and infrastructure has proved more difficult.

“In small villages, you go for an ultrasound in the morning and in the afternoon the baker congratulates you on your pregnancy,” Monik Rodriguez, 33, told AFP.

Rodriguez, who has three children, runs a service accompanying women who want to have an abortion in Salta, a conservative Catholic province in the South American country.

Away from the big city of Buenos Aires, where women erupted in celebration when the law was approved, many in more remote and conservative areas of Argentina face the same stigma as before.

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“There are still things that need to come out of hiding,” said Rodriguez, who can take up to 125 telephone calls a month as part of the project launched by the Women’s Strength civil association.

“The most important thing is to listen. It’s about trying to overcome the hurdles, accompanying them through the health system so they don’t get lost in the bureaucratic labyrinth.”

Rodriguez takes calls from all sorts: teenagers and first-time mothers to women with large families and even those that are pre-menopausal.

“On this line, abortion is not recommended but neither is motherhood romanticized,” said Rodriguez, who underwent a secret abortion a decade ago when already mother to one child.

“I was late and had an abortion. It went badly and I had to go to hospital. The tests showed I hadn’t been pregnant.

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“It was the secrecy that created worry. Along with misinformation, that is what puts us at risk.”

The government estimates that 3,000 women died between 1983 and 2020 in clandestine abortions, of which there were up to 500,000 a year.

– Anti-abortion pressure –

For a century, abortion was only legal in cases of rape or if the mother’s life was at risk.

Legalization has not led to a sudden spate of abortions, particularly in places like Salta.

Miranda Ruiz, 33, is the only doctor in Tartagal — a small town of 75,000 people in Salta — not to exercise her legal right to be a conscientious objector to carrying out abortions.

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Anti-abortion groups in the town are influential.

In September, Ruiz was briefly detained following an accusation by the aunt of a 21-year-old patient that she had performed an abortion beyond the authorized limit of 14 weeks.

Feminist groups are demanding that her case be dismissed.

“It is a way of bringing the other doctors to heel,” said Sofia Fernandez, a member of the National Campaign for the Right to Abortion — a collective of 300 feminist organizations that have been fighting for 15 years for change.

They say there are still 1,500 people facing criminal cases over abortions.

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The complaint against Ruiz was the only one made in 2021, although there have been 36 court filings against the law, mostly claiming it is unconstitutional.

“Of those, 24 have already been dismissed,” said Valeria Isla, the director of sexual and reproductive health at the health ministry.

– ‘Huge inequality’ –

“There is a huge inequality in access to the practice depending on location,” said Isla.

During the course of 2021, the number of specialist medical teams carrying out abortions rose from 943 to 1,243 despite the pandemic complicating matters.

Distribution of the drug misoprostol, which chemically provokes abortions, rose from 9,000 in 2019 to more than 43,000 in 2021.

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“But there is a lot of demand and we’re not able to increase (the number of) these (teams) at the necessary rate. It’s a structural stumbling block,” added Isla.

There were more than 32,000 abortions conducted in public hospitals and clinics in 2021, said Isla, whose big goal for 2022 is to train medical teams specialized in abortions, to make their services more widely available and to inform women of their rights and the tools at their disposal.

That would help Rodriguez avoid taking calls from desperate young teenagers like one “locked in a bathroom crying … she had just dropped a home pregnancy test down the toilet and couldn’t afford to buy another one.”

International

FBI Warns of Possible Iranian Drone Attack on U.S. West Coast

The Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) has warned police departments in California about a possible Iranian plan to carry out a drone attack against the west coast of the United States, according to a report published Wednesday by ABC News.

The warning was issued through a memorandum sent to agencies participating in a Joint Terrorism Task Force, outlining the possibility of a surprise attack involving unmanned aerial vehicles launched from a vessel off the U.S. coastline.

According to the document, intelligence suggested that in early February 2026 Iran may have considered an attack against unspecified targets in California if the United States carried out airstrikes on Iranian territory.

However, the memo also noted that authorities lack additional details about the timing, method, specific targets, or individuals responsible for the alleged plan.

Reports cited by U.S. media indicate that the alert coincided with the start of a military offensive by the administration of Donald Trump against the Iran, a development that has heightened tensions across the Middle East.

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Law enforcement sources with counterterrorism experience told the Los Angeles Times that the warning is part of a routine precautionary advisory based on information from the U.S. Coast Guard.

The sources emphasized that there is no credible indication of an imminent attack and no evidence that Iran currently has the capability to successfully carry out such an operation.

California is home to the largest Iranian community in the United States. According to the Migration Policy Institute, more than half of Iranian immigrants in the country lived in the state in 2019, including around 140,000 people in Los Angeles County alone.

The city also hosts a neighborhood widely known as “Tehrangeles,” where a large Iranian community began settling in the 1960s and continued to grow following the Iranian Revolution.

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International

Trump Says Iran Is Welcome at 2026 World Cup but Warns of Security Concerns

The President of the United States, Donald Trump, said Thursday that the national football team of Iran is “welcome” to participate in the 2026 World Cup, although he suggested it might be safer for the team not to take part in the tournament.

“The Iranian national soccer team is welcome at the World Cup, but I really don’t think it’s appropriate for them to be there, for their own safety,” Trump wrote on his social media platform Truth Social.

His comments came a day after Iran’s sports minister, Ahman Donyamali, said that there are currently no conditions for the country to participate in the tournament following the killing of Iran’s Supreme Leader, Ali Khamenei, during a military offensive launched on February 28 by Israel and the United States.

“After the corrupt government killed our leader, there are no conditions that allow us to take part in the World Cup,” the Iranian official said. He added that the country has faced two wars in the past eight or nine months, resulting in thousands of civilian deaths, making participation in the tournament unlikely.

On Tuesday, the president of FIFA, Gianni Infantino, met with Trump at the White House.

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Following the meeting, Infantino said that Trump reiterated that Iran’s national team would be allowed to compete in the FIFA World Cup 2026.

“We discussed the current situation in Iran and the fact that the Iranian team has qualified to participate in the FIFA World Cup 2026. During the conversation, President Trump reiterated that the Iranian team is, of course, welcome to compete in the tournament in the United States,” Infantino wrote on Instagram.

International

Iran issues threat to Trump as conflict escalates over Strait of Hormuz

The head of Iran’s Supreme National Security Council, Ali Larijani, threatened U.S. President Donald Trump on Tuesday, warning him to “beware of being eliminated.”

The Republican president had warned on Monday that he would strike Iran “very hard” if the Islamic Republic blocked oil shipments through the Strait of Hormuz, which has effectively been closed since the war began eleven days ago.

“Iran is not afraid of your empty threats. Others more powerful than you tried to destroy the Iranian nation and failed. Beware that you are not eliminated,” Larijani wrote on X.

Earlier, Iran’s Revolutionary Guards — the ideological military force of the Islamic Republic — also said their forces would move to block oil exports from the Gulf.

Meanwhile, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said Israel’s military offensive against Iran is far from over.

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“Our aspiration is that the Iranian people free themselves from the yoke of tyranny; ultimately, that depends on them. But there is no doubt that with the measures taken so far we are breaking their bones, and we are not finished yet,” Netanyahu said in a statement.