For three years, Silvia Alanis visited high schools in a small town in northern Argentina, teaching sex education and providing teenagers with birth control as part of a federally funded effort to lower high rates of teen pregnancy.
But now the program has been largely dismantled by the government of President Javier Milei, who has called feminism a “ridiculous” fight that threatens Western values and described abortion as “aggravated murder.”
As part of a broader belt-tightening plan to address Argentina’s prolonged economic crisis, Mr. Milei is cutting programs aimed at women, and pushing back against policies that promote gender equity and diversity.
Roughly 600 of the employees of the teen pregnancy program were fired this year — eliminating the bulk of its work force.
The program, which sent hundreds of workers across the country, helped significantly reduce the rate of babies born to young women, according to experts.
Ms. Alanis, who was among those dismissed from the teen pregnancy program, received a voice message not too long ago from a staff member at one of the high schools where she had worked.
Two girls were pregnant. One was 15, the other 14, the worker said, adding, “We really miss you.”
Argentina has built a reputation as one of Latin America’s most socially progressive countries, and large protests there in 2015 against the killing of women inspired a grass-roots women’s movement throughout the region.
In 2020, Argentina became the largest Latin American nation to make abortion legal.
But Mr. Milei won the presidency last year after Argentina’s voters, weary over years of extraordinarily high inflation, embraced his promise to reverse the country’s economic decline through bold measures.
His government has been aggressively following through on his pledge.
The budget for Argentina’s office of sexual and reproductive health, used mostly to purchase supplies like contraception and abortion pills to distribute across the country, has been slashed this year by nearly two-thirds.
Since the start of the year, the federal government has not distributed a fresh supply of abortion pills to Argentina’s provinces, according to the United Nations Population Fund and information obtained by human rights groups. Provinces, which typically rely on the federal government for the pills, have had to buy their own.
The Milei government has also banned the use of gender-inclusive language in official documents and — in a move that critics say is symbolic but telling — announced on International Women’s Day that it was renaming the Hall of Women in the presidential palace as the Hall of Argentine Heroes, replacing portraits of female leaders with those of former male statesmen.
Mr. Milei’s moves around programs aimed at women are part of deep cuts to public spending, including health, education and federal payments to provinces, that have reduced the country’s chronic fiscal deficit and helped drive down a double-digit monthly inflation rate to 3.5 percent.
That has helped earn him praise from supporters, investors and the International Monetary Fund, the country’s biggest lender.
But it has come at a price.
Argentina’s poverty rate climbed to nearly 53 percent in the first half of 2024, according to government data, up from roughly 42 percent when Mr. Milei became president. Austerity measures like the reduction of government subsidies have made it harder for families to afford basic goods.
The broad belt tightening has prompted protests from a wide cross-section of society, from university students to pensioners.
After taking office in December, Mr. Milei swiftly shut down the Ministry of Women, Genders and Diversity. (He also closed several other ministries, including transportation, public works and education).
In speeches before high school students in Buenos Aires and at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, he has taken aim at abortion rights advocates. He defines feminism as an “unnatural battle between man and woman.”
“All that this radical feminism agenda has led to is greater state intervention to hinder the economic process, give a job to bureaucrats who don’t contribute anything to society,” Mr. Milei said at the Davos forum.
Mr. Milei has also railed against Argentina’s policy of mandatory sex education in schools, which he claims brainwashes children because it teaches gender identity and can include discussions about transgender issues.
Argentina’s teen pregnancy prevention program was rolled out in 2018 in 12 of Argentina’s 23 provinces that had some of the highest teen pregnancy rates.
Ms. Alanis, who worked in a town in the province of Salta, was sought out privately by girls in high school with questions about contraception. She would outline their options, such as getting an intrauterine device or a contraceptive implant.
“We were neither parents nor teachers,” Ms. Alanis said, adding that her role was “above all else, not judging” students.
One of them was Rafaela. After a frightening experience with an abortion that she said went awry and resulted in a life-threatening infection, she went to school looking for Ms. Alanis, the one adult Rafaela trusted to talk to about sex.
She asked that her last name not be published to protect her privacy because she lives in a small town where most people do not know she got an abortion.
She was 16 at the time, and wanted to start using contraception. So she pulled up a chair in Ms. Alanis’s spartan school office to discuss next steps; she ultimately got an implant at a hospital.
Rafaela, who is now 19, said her family was conservative and did not discuss anything having to do with sex.
From 2018 to 2021, the rate of babies born to teenagers ages 15 to 19 dropped precipitously across Argentina, which experts attribute to various factors, including the legalization of abortion and a changing social climate.
During that period, the rate dropped faster in the 12 provinces with the teen pregnancy program, falling nearly 46 percent, to 29 births, from 53 births, per 1,000 teenagers. In the rest of the country, the rate dropped by 42 percent, to 23 births from 40.
Officials found the decline so promising that in 2023, the previous administration had planned to expand the program to every province. But in April, Mr. Milei’s government announced a “redesign” and said it was dismissing the plan’s workers, who also trained teachers in sex education and connected victims of sexual abuse to legal aid and medical providers, to save about $1 million.
Argentina’s Health Ministry did not respond to multiple requests for comment.
Among the programs whose budgets have been cut is Acompañar, which offered aid equal to six months’ minimum wage to 350,000 women and L.G.B.T.Q. people facing gender violence, and a 24-hour hotline to help victims.
The ministry’s programs are now overseen by Argentina’s justice minister, who has said that “violence doesn’t have a gender.”
Among the most concerning issues to human rights groups is the federal government’s failure this year to distribute free medical-abortion drugs to the provinces.
The government said its supplies had run out and it had opened a bidding process to find a vendor.
Some advocates questioned why it was taking so long.
“There’s no justification,” said Lucila Galkin, the director of the gender and diversity program for the Argentina chapter of Amnesty International.
Experts said tackling teen pregnancy was a smart economic strategy because young women who become pregnant often drop out of school and earn less. There is an effort in Congress to save the program via legislation.
“It’s a complete dismantling of public policy,” said Valeria Isla, who directed the Health Ministry’s office of sexual and reproductive health under the previous government. “I struggle a lot to understand the reasons because the result is devastating.”
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