“Belén,” as the media calls her, is 11-years-old. Since she was nine, she has been repeatedly raped by her mother’s boyfriend, who is 32. Belén didn’t tell anyone about the abuse because her abuser threatened that he would kill her. Her mother claims that the relationship between her boyfriend and her daughter, which started when she 9, was consensual! But Belén’s grandmother alerted the police about the crime when she saw her grandaughter was pregnant.
Yep. Belen is 14 weeks pregnant. And she lives in one of the five countries where abortion is illegal under any circumstances, with no exceptions whatsoever, even in cases of rape, incest, the safety or the life of the woman. In 1931, Chile legalized therepeutic abortions for health reasons, but the dictator Augusto Pinochet, famous for his violations of human rights and his penchant for torture, banned abortion completely in 1989. It was only in 2004 that Chile legalized divorce. And to this day, Chile lives under the dictatorship’s abortion laws.
On Monday, Belén appeared on television and said the following heartbreaking words: “It will be a like a doll that I will hold in my arms … I will love it a lot, whatever it is, even though it’s from this man who hurt me.” […]
katiehalper.com 