Espindola also now appears to have Chilean society on her side. According to a 2008 survey on women's rights and living conditions, 68 percent of Chileans favor allowing abortion when the mother's life is in danger.
Yet lifting the abortion ban may not be straightforward.
Bachelet's ruling coalition has a shaky majority in both houses of congress, with 21 of 38 senators and 67 of 120 members of the lower house. They're drawn from six different parties, spanning from the Communists to the center-right Christian Democrats. Few, including Dides, dare predict which way any vote will go.
Crucially, the Catholic Church and, increasingly, evangelicals, hold huge political sway in Latin America, where many politicians even on the left - including the populist presidents of Bolivia, Ecuador and Nicaragua - oppose abortion.
That means some members of the coalition, even those on the far left, might vote against the reform.
Meanwhile, the socially conservative opposition lawmakers are expected to fight tooth and nail to keep the ban.
GlobalPost repeatedly sought comment from three opposition senators opposed to abortion, but their staff said they were unavailable. But Sen. Alberto Espina neatly summed up their position during the 2012 debate about a previous attempt, which failed, to reform the abortion law.
He argued that regardless of the circumstances, including the health of the fetus, terminating a pregnancy is wrong. "In whatever condition, children yet to be born are not ours. They are human beings, with rights that must be protected. I opt for the right of the baby due to be born," Espina said.
Although many Latin American countries do - at least in theory - allow abortion in limited circumstances such as those Bachelet proposed, many women in the region cannot access safe, legal terminations.
According to the Guttmacher Institute, a US nonprofit research group that supports reproductive rights, 95 percent of the 4.4 million terminations carried out in the region in 2008 were unsafe. In other words, they were backstreet abortions often by people without any medical qualifications.
Meanwhile, about 1 million women a year in Latin America need hospital treatment as a result of underground abortions gone wrong, which account for 12 percent of all maternal deaths.
Many of them are poor. Wealthier women wanting an abortion can, sometimes, hire doctors to carry out illegal but safe terminations or travel abroad.
Yet the pro-abortion camp is making progress.
Uruguay and Mexico City now permit abortions on demand in the first trimester, while Argentina allows them in rape cases. Colombia in 2006 lifted its blanket ban to allow abortions in cases of rape, incest, risk to the mother's life and where the fetus would be unviable after birth. Brazil now allows terminations in cases of brain abnormalities.
Until Chile follows the same path as Colombia, Dides expects more horror stories like that of Espindola or "Belen," an 11-year-old girl whose case became a cause celebre in Chile last year.
Belen, whose real name cannot be published for legal reasons, became pregnant after her stepfather repeatedly raped her. After she gave birth, former President Sebastian Pinera praised her "maturity," a comment that left many women's rights campaigners aghast.
"It's brutal to hear our president saying things like that," Dides says. "It's just complete ignorance. It's not possible that she was mature enough, physiologically or psychologically. This girl was effectively tortured and there is no excuse for that kind of comment."
Nevertheless, Chile, and Latin America, may already be ahead of the US in one aspect of the public debate about abortion.
"I have never heard of a situation in Latin America where doctors are being gunned down for performing abortions," says Lilian Sepulveda, a Latin America specialist at the Center for Reproductive Rights.
Whether that translates to the lifting of Chile's blanket ban on abortion will now be decided by Bachelet and the country's fragmented congress.
