Lucy Lorena Libreros | America – 10 March, 2022
The right to abortion is simultaneously advancing and regressing in Latin America, where at the same time that significant steps are being taken in the conquest of sexual and reproductive rights, such as the recent ruling of the Constitutional Court of Colombia decriminalizing the voluntary interruption of pregnancy up to 24 weeks, an obstructionism persists that in practice prevents women from exercising these rights to the fullest.
Colombia has been the latest country in the region to join the Green Wave that has been sweeping Latin America since Argentina passed an abortion law in December 2020 and Mexico’s Supreme Court declared the criminalization of abortion unconstitutional in September 2021.
However, several experts consulted by Efe are concerned about the difficulty of exercising this right in countries where the law regulates it but in practice it is very difficult to guarantee the performance of abortions under adequate conditions.
The right to abortion is not guaranteed
This is the opinion of Catalina Martínez Coral, spokesperson for the Causa Justa Movement and regional director for Latin America and the Caribbean of the Center for Reproductive Rights, for whom “major restrictions for women” still persist in the region.
“It is of concern that there are six countries that retain a total criminalization of abortion (El Salvador, Honduras, Suriname, Haiti, Dominican Republic and Nicaragua), countries where adolescents and girls cannot carry out this practice under any circumstances, not even when the pregnancy puts their lives at risk or when it is the result of rape,” he denounces.
And this is happening in a region where, according to data from the Guttmacher Institute in New York, more than six million abortions are performed each year, 60% of which are unsafe.
For Martínez Coral, the panorama is very complex, “not only because it has a strong impact on the lives of women because they cannot access health services and have to seek them clandestinely, but also because of what it implies in terms of criminalization, with cases such as that of El Salvador, where women who have wanted to exercise this right end up being tried for aggravated homicide”.
With nuances that vary from one country to another, the truth is that the struggle of Latin American women for full access to their reproductive rights continues to be bittersweet.
Colombia’s historic progress
Last February, Colombia achieved a historic advance in sexual and reproductive rights: in a country where every year some 400 women are prosecuted for having abortions and several thousand more are forced to go to clandestine clinics, a ruling by the Constitutional Court determined that no woman can be prosecuted for terminating her pregnancy up to the 24th week.
It thus became the Latin American country with the longest gestational period for accessing abortion services. Martínez Coral applauds this decision, since this is a country where an average of 70 women die each year due to clandestine abortions.
“This number is an underreporting, we know that many more die,” adds this activist, who uses figures from the Guttmacher Institute to ensure that 400,000 abortions are performed each year, 25% of which are unsafe and are performed “without dignified access to health conditions”.
In practice, the ruling of the Colombian Constitutional Court contemplates two transcendental aspects: on the one hand, “access to abortion services, which is now done under the sole decision of the woman, without having to present, as before, a certificate proving that her health was at risk or that she was a victim of sexual violence, adds Martínez Coral.
A second change is the one that allows women to access abortion in these 24 weeks without being criminally denounced. “We know that more than 53% of the cases that exist against adolescents and girls for seeking abortion services come from the health system itself. In Colombia there are some 5,000 open cases,” recalls the spokeswoman for the Causa Justa Movement.
For Martínez Coral, the grounds that Colombia had until now were not being sufficient, since according to data from the National Administrative Department of Statistics (DANE) only in 2020 more than 4,000 girls between 10 and 14 years of age gave birth.
The most progressive
Like Colombia, several countries in the region have made progress in protecting the right to abortion, albeit in a limited way. Argentine women, for example, have a law that allows them to voluntarily terminate their pregnancies up to 14 weeks of gestation legally, safely and free of charge.
In Mexico – where only in the state of Oaxaca and Mexico City legal termination of pregnancy was allowed up to the 12th week – the Supreme Court of Justice established in September of last year that criminalizing abortion was illegal, and recognized the right to life from the moment an individual is conceived, a ruling that set a precedent for its application in the other states of the country.
The list of countries with laws regulating abortion includes Cuba, where women won this right in 1965. Also Uruguay, which not only allows voluntary termination of pregnancy up to 12 weeks, but also promotes policies of prevention and support for women in their reproductive health, as well as Guyana, French Guiana and Puerto Rico, the latter country where there is no gestational time limit for access to abortion.
Although with more timid processes, Brazil and Chile have also included in their respective penal codes the variables of rape and non-viability of the fetus in order for women to have access to legal abortion. In the case of Chilean women, the maximum period is the first twelve weeks.
In Bolivia, incest is accepted as a ground for abortion, while in Belize the authorities take into account the socioeconomic reality of the woman. Ecuador, on the other hand, provides for the right to voluntary termination of pregnancy on three grounds: threat to the life or health of the woman, fetal malformation and sexual assault.
From hospital to jail
The Green Wave, however, has not reached several places in the Caribbean, South and Central America, with El Salvador and Honduras leading the list of countries that criminalize abortion in all circumstances.
Catalina Martínez Coral criticizes that in El Salvador “even women who have suffered obstetric emergencies (involuntary pregnancy loss) end up being criminally prosecuted, denounced for abortion and subsequently prosecuted for the crime of aggravated homicide”.
The laws are so harsh, she denounces, that many Salvadoran women, instead of receiving medical attention and psychological support, are arrested and sentenced to 2 to 30 years in prison.
In Honduras, despite growing pressure from feminist collectives, the Parliament has upheld Article 67 of the Constitution, which rejects the termination of pregnancy and totally criminalizes this practice.
The same is true in Nicaragua, where it has been considered a crime since 2006 and where in 2017, the National Assembly succumbed to pressure from different religious sectors to prevent the legislation on the matter from being modified.
The Dominican Republic, which has had legal abortion on its public agenda for several years, has not yet achieved legal changes, so this right is not allowed under any circumstances.
The list of nations with these same measures is completed by Haiti, which a couple of years ago failed to achieve the necessary consensus to decriminalize abortion up to the 12th week, as some advocacy associations had intended, and Suriname.
The social cost for girls and adolescents
The Center for Reproductive Rights, through the Girls, Not Mothers campaign – of which several regional organizations are also part – has documented the drama “that means that girls who are victims of rape cannot access sexual and reproductive health services and have to face maternity when they are so young”.
According to data from the United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA) and the Latin American and Caribbean Committee for the Defense of Women’s Rights, 12% of women in the region have suffered some type of sexual violence.
A “drama of great dimensions,” says the director for Latin America and the Caribbean of the Center for Reproductive Rights, since the region has the second highest rate of pregnancies in the world, with about 18% of births corresponding to children under 20 years of age, and where every year one and a half million adolescent women between 15 and 19 years of age give birth.
“This implies dropping out of school and social and economic precariousness,” reflects Martínez Coral, who maintains that in the end, beyond the legal or medical issue, deciding on abortion means “for women to be able to make informed decisions about the first territory over which those decisions must be made: their body.”