Is
it too late to repeal the Boland Amendment? Surely, this is not what famous
Sandinista supporters like Jackson Browne and Bill de Blasio had in mind. They
might have been happy to see their old political heart throb Daniel Ortega
regain the Nicaraguan presidency, but it came at a price. Ortega agreed to
support legislation making abortion completely 100% illegal in the country and
he delivered. Alessandra Zeka & Holen Sabrina Kahn follow a Sandinista-loyalist
OBGYN as she deals with the consequences of the new policy throughout A Quiet Inquisition, which screens
during the 2014 Human Rights Watch Film Festival in New York.
There
was a time when the word church would have Ortega reaching for his gun. Then
the voters heaved him out of power. Low and behold, Ortega saw the light in
2006, converting to Catholicism and reinventing himself as a Christian
Liberation Socialist. Apparently, he agreed to follow the local diocese’s
domestic policies, in exchange for their fairly overt support. As a result, Dr.
Carla Cerrato and her colleagues can do absolutely nothing to “interfere” with
a technically living baby/fetus, no matter what the health risks for the mother.
While nobody directly addresses the enforcement, it is clearly severe enough
that neither Dr. Cerrato nor her colleagues ever even try to bend the rules.
The
irony of Sandinista Nicaragua becoming a socialist Handmaid’s Tale is so massively obvious, Inquisition and its subject simply cannot ignore it, but Zeka &
Kahn resist exploring it as much as possible. One would think any muckraker
worth their salt would try to approach Hizzoner for his assessment of women’s
rights under Ortega. Instead, they concentrate on horror stories (one suspects
to minimize the Sandinista particulars and maximize its general abortion-rights
messaging). However, as sad as each case study is, they quickly become
repetitive.
Frankly,
Inquisition completely misses the
bigger picture. This law is not changing anytime soon, because Ortega is not
leaving office again without a full scale revolution. Having recently repealed
presidential term limits, he is clearly following the Chavez-Morales playbook,
turning relatively legitimate electoral victories into a lifetime dictatorships
by undermining democratic safeguards with rigged constituent assemblies and the
like.
