The Horror Project: Milei Seeks to Legitimize the Abandonment, Poverty, and Violation of Childhood

The candidate for deputy for the Freedom Advances party, Lilia Lemoine, spoke on a program about the project that she would send to Congress if Milei is the candidate who wins the next elections. “The renunciation of paternity” is the proposal of this candidate that generated indignation on social media and the total repudiation of all human rights organizations. What is it about and why is everything that has been said fallacious? In this article we speak with Sabrina Cartabria, lawyer, specialist and one of the creators of the care index to try to unravel the sea of violence of one of the most dangerous discourses of the neo-right. If pregnant people can decide to have an abortion or not, why can’t men? Cartabria responds clearly: “There is neither the renunciation of motherhood nor the renunciation of paternity because abortion occurs before you become a mother. That is, before birth. When you already have a birth, there is already a person and that person has rights. That is why fatherhood and motherhood cannot be renounced. There are international conventions that protect these children.” The trickiest issue in this debate is where the focus is placed. The issue of child support cannot be measured in an imaginary battle between men and women, because it is not a right of adults but of children. First and very serious mistake of the supposed project.” The proposal that men can renounce their paternity has serious problems from the point of view of human rights, first and foremost because it leaves children and adolescents in a situation of great vulnerability, today in our country we have the serious problem of non-compliance with the maintenance obligation, which according to official data from both the Ministry of Women of the Province of Buenos Aires and UNICEF at the national level. Seven out of ten do not comply with it. In other words, in 70% of cases, men do not comply with their parental responsibilities, they are disengaged from the care of their children and do not pass the maintenance obligation. The proposal is basically to legalize and give an institutional framework to this practice that violates the rights of children and adolescents,” says the lawyer. Among many things, the bill would legalize the lack of identity and the legitimacy of abandonment. “It would also take away the Right to Identity and also the right to care and alimony, in this sense what we must highlight is that this proposal made by the candidate for deputy is not beneficial for society and is directly a proposal that goes against the rights of children and adolescents,” Indicates. To try to understand the poverty of a country, there is a factor to take into account that neither Lemoine nor La Libertad Avanza contemplate: the feminization of poverty. This problem, explained by economists from all over the world, brings with it a lot of inequality in children and adolescents. “We have to understand that if we are looking for the country to be better, to have economic growth, it is essential to bet on supporting children, so that children do not fall into poverty. With children with more rights and better care and more protection, they will be the adults of the future who carry out the process of economic growth that we are all looking for. This proposal seeks to impoverish children and take away their rights. It’s aberrant and we’re very much against it,” says Cartabia.
Lemoine’s cautionary rationale for the alleged bill is that if women legally have the right to have an abortion, men should also have the choice. Faced with this premise, the first and easiest thing to answer is that men already make use of this freedom. It is socially accepted and implicit that, by not putting your body on the line, a man can disengage at any time with almost no legal consequences. And I say almost because although it can be taken to Justice, the path is so cumbersome and difficult that most decide not to even start it. Faced with Lemoine’s discomfort with this supposed inequality between pregnant people and cisgender men, there are well-founded answers. On December 20, 2020, legal abortion was achieved in our country after very long debates that made it clear that, in this case and in so many others, putting your body on the line is what gives you freedoms.” Women have the right to abortion because the process of pregnancy and subsequent childbirth takes place in their lives. Therefore, no one can or should force them to continue with a pregnancy if they do not want to, much less to give birth because of all the effects that pregnancy and childbirth have on the body. In addition, the psychological and social effects of being pregnant and then giving birth and carrying out motherhood. It is different in the case of men because they do not gestate, therefore they cannot force a woman to have an abortion because that process of abortion or childbirth and pregnancy occurs in the other in the body of another person,” Cartabria responds forcefully.USE AND ABUSEThe candidate’s speech falls into many fallacies but one of the most basic is to confuse the non-use of contraceptives with sexual abuse. When the driver asks her what would happen if it is actually the man who decides not to take care of herself (as happens in most cases), Lemoinde replies that if it does, that is rape and that the woman can take the morning-after pill so as not to get pregnant. The confusion is total. Also, if there is no pregnancy, what project are we talking about? The interesting thing is that, when you want to place the responsibility on both parties, which is, in short, what happens or should happen in a pregnancy, Lemoine chaotically and erratically evades the answer. Even so, as we said before, absent fathers have always existed and most of them do not pay the maintenance quota. The only thing this project would achieve is to legitimize something that already happens in practice and that complicates the lives of millions of women and children in our country.” According to the data we have from the Ministry of the Province of Buenos Aires at the provincial level, but also from UNICEF at the national level, approximately 7 out of 10 men fail to pay their maintenance obligations. Today we have a factor of non-compliance with the maintenance obligation that is very large in this country. It’s the majority of cases, it’s not an isolated case. What Lemoine is proposing is very serious because she comes in some way to ratify and say that these men have a right to get rid of the responsibilities that have to do with care, which is in fact happening today,” he says. When a parent does not want to pay child support, the courts seize part of his salary. Neither stupid nor lazy, many parents ask that their salaries, their properties and their cars not be registered in order to evade Justice, which has to carry out other maneuvers to try to get the men to take charge. Penalize them and prevent them from renewing their driver’s license, prohibit them from entering the field so that they cannot see their soccer team and even seizing their electricity and gas. These desperate measures denote the unwillingness of parents to take care of at least the most basic things. And even though we are only talking about money, the responsibility of loving, patient, stable and necessary care for free childhoods is left for another time. 

Original source in Spanish