On Monday, the president of the Chamber of Deputies Alfredo Pacheco (PRM-National District) announced that the lower house of Congress had agreed to fast track the Penal Code together with a series of other bills that had been languishing for years in the Chamber of Deputies.
The announcement made the headlines on Tuesday. Pacheco said that since a consensus could not be reached, the legislators will remove the three exceptions to the Penal Code that had been added to authorize abortion in the Dominican Republic. The Catholic Church and evangelical churches strongly oppose removing the absolute ban on abortion in the Dominican Republic.
The important bill had not passed in Congress because it had been vetoed on two occasions by former President Danilo Medina, precisely for not including the three exceptions — rape, incest, and protecting the mother’s life. The three exceptions are included in the government program of President Luis Abinader and had been approved by the current government party, the Modern Revolutionary Party (PRM), in an executive meeting on 26 July 2016, as reported in Diario Libre. The spokesperson for the PRM in the Senate, senator Faride Raful is a strong advocate for the three exceptions.
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Diario Libre
18 August 2020