134
C. LAGOS AND L. ANTEZANA
sphere contributes to the reinforcement of this frame with images of women as mothers, responsible individuals for the care of children even under violent circumstances, as merely carriers of somebody else’s life, and as recipients of “the gift of life” for somebody else, but not necessarily for themselves. Thus, women are subjected to and constrained by structural violence embedded in the total prohibition of abortion as the highest control mechanism over their humanness, the extreme social reaction that pro- choice advocacy triggers, and as a part of a broader trend of machista social relations that can end in cases like Lucía’s: Forced, suppressed, and disposable bodies, mere corpses lacking in will and humanness. Discourse distributed through the digital public sphere strengthen this frame, hindering public efforts to guarantee safety and women’s basic human rights. We focus primarily on online coverage and readers’ comments considering the abortion bill proposed by the Chilean government in January 2015 that included the decriminalization of abortion in three circumstances—and which became a law in 2017—as well as some visual discourses that circulated through online social networks mobilizing contesting discourses regarding abortion, in particular in Chile, triggered by a public campaign against gender-based violence and pro-choice. The material crafted in the Chilean digital public sphere is enlightened by a broader focus on South American networks, discourses, and theoretical contributions.
Giving Birth as a Duty Latin America holds the most restrictive abortion regulations in the world. Indeed, 4 out of 5 of the countries around the world in which abortion is totally banned are located on the continent: Nicaragua, El Salvador, Dominican Republic, and (until late 2017) Chile. In the rest of the region, abortion is barely accepted under very restricted circumstances, like saving a woman’s life, due to very specific physical health conditions and eventually in rape cases. However, there are several practical obstacles that prohibit these limited exceptions, like the conservative practice of denying abortions among health staff, restrictions enforced through allegations in court, inaccessible facilities, or lack of trained personnel. In Chile, before the 2017 law—which a new conservative government has vowed to revise—a woman could be criminally prosecuted and face up to five years in prison if she interrupted her pregnancy. The prohibition
