Santo Domingo.- Chanting slogans rebuking the imminent constitutional ban on most types of abortion, thousands of women marched on Congress Wednesday, to protest against the assembly members who would vote for the measure.

“What we want with this great march is to ask the Revisory Assembly to rectify article 30 of the new Constitution,” said Sergio Galván, director of the Woman and Health Collective.

She said the controversial article “threatens the life of women, violates her consecrated human rights already, limits the exercise of the medical professional class, and the access to contraceptive methods.”

Representatives of hundreds of organizations, grouped in the movement National Constitutional Retrograde Resistance Coordinator, marched to the Congress to rebuke the Revisory Assembly’s approval, in a first roll call, of the controversial amendment.

In the new Constitution Article 30 would establish: “the right to life is inviolable from conception to death. “Capital punishment will neither be established, nor pronounced nor applied in any case.”

“Article 30 constitutes an social backward movement incompatible with the constitution, called to guide the men and women of this country towards the future of prosperity, justice and fairness, for which this nation has suffered and fought for as well,” states the protesters’ document handed  to a commission of legislators.