Abortion realigning Puerto Rico politics, helping conservatives

SAN JUAN, Puerto Rico — Three years ago, after Puerto Rico’s legislature narrowly defeated new abortion restrictions, cardiologist and pastor César Vázquez Muñiz founded a new political party whose mission, he vowed, would include “defending life.”

Now, with just one senator and one representative in the Legislative Assembly, Vázquez’s upstart party, Project Dignity, has helped lead a new attempt to limit abortion on the island, one of only a handful of U.S. jurisdictions where the procedure remains legal at any point during pregnancy.

The abortion fight is the clearest sign yet that Puerto Rican politics, long focused on whether the island should keep its territorial status or seek to become a state, are realigning. Fed up with how the status issue has overshadowed fixing people’s day-to-day problems, voters have begun coalescing around new parties focused on social issues and partisan ideology. As a result, legislative debates have begun to look a little more like those between Democrats and Republicans in the states — giving conservatives an opportunity to grow their power.

“We do want to defend children before birth and our other particular ideological issues,” Vázquez said in a recent interview. “But fundamentally, we want to turn back 40 years of government corruption.”

In June, the Puerto Rico Senate passed legislation banning abortions after 22 weeks, without exceptions for rape or incest. Five days later, the U.S. Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade. Puerto Rico lawmakers have since filed a flurry of other bills limiting abortion, including one from Project Dignity that would prohibit it after about six weeks of pregnancy, signaling an increasingly aggressive stance among some lawmakers against the procedure.

“The political class has been too timid,” Sen. Joanne Rodríguez Veve, a Project Dignity member and a sponsor of the 22-week ban, said in an interview. “Women have the right to decide about many things in our lives — our profession, our friends, our jobs. Women do not have the right to decide who lives and who dies.”

Even if the relatively modest 22-week ban ultimately fails — lawmakers in the House of Representatives appear cooler to the idea — abortion rights backers in Puerto Rico fear that they are now up against two anti-abortion strategies that have been successful in many states: chipping away at legal abortion with piecemeal restrictions, and seeking to eliminate it altogether, a tactic that has gained momentum since the end of Roe.

In the aftermath of economic crisis, bankruptcy, Hurricane Maria, political scandal and the coronavirus pandemic, Puerto Ricans have started to abandon traditional parties defined by whether the island should remain a commonwealth, become a state or seek independence, moving instead to fledgling ones more concerned with social issues, such as Project Dignity.

“I think the traditional parties are going to blow up in the next five years,” said Eduardo Bhatia, a former Senate president from the pro-commonwealth party who now teaches at Princeton. “You’ll have two parties, liberals and conservatives. We’re going to be something more similar to Democrats and Republicans.”

In Puerto Rico’s last election, in 2020, many younger voters drifted to Citizen Victory Movement, a party whose leaders say that solving the island’s economic and social problems is more important than settling the status question. Some Christian conservatives moved to Project Dignity.

The result is a difficult-to-label legislature that has strengthened penalties against gender-based violence but is also considering abortion restrictions — a dynamic that challenges the notion held by many in Washington that if Puerto Rico were a state, it would be a liberal haven.

“This is a legislature that reflects Puerto Rico’s complexity,” said Sen. Ana Irma Rivera Lassén, a member of Citizen Victory Movement, who has filed legislation to codify the right to abortion. “No one has an absolute majority right now. You always have to look for votes on the other side.”