Category: International

“Only one country in the world has fully decriminalized abortion.”

Enormous barriers to access to safe abortion continue to exist around the world, despite some important advances that have been made in recent decades. This progress has been achieved primarily through the work of feminist movements, bringing about change through the evolution of human rights standards relating to abortion, the adoption of progressive legislation, and court rulings that increasingly recognize the right to abortion.

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Child marriage in Bolivia: Complaints reach the IACHR

In Bolivia, child marriage is legal, which “is really unacceptable” for the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights (IACHR), which received a report that the Government dismissed as “implausible”, “irresponsible” and “inconsistent”.

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Day of Children and Adolescents of the Americas: IACHR Urges States to Guarantee Education Free of Sexual Violence

OAS – In the framework of the Day of Children and Adolescents of the Americas, the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights (IACHR) expresses its concern about the persistence of sexual violence against children and adolescents in the educational sphere in the region. In this regard, it calls on States to address the structural causes that generate this form of violence, through the adoption of prevention measures and their eradication in educational environments, with a gender perspective.

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Latin American women are winning the fight for legal abortion

In February of this year, Colombia’s constitutional court eliminated the crime of abortion (up to 24 weeks of gestation) from the criminal code, in response to a lawsuit filed by Causa Justa, spearheading a broad social and legal campaign involving more than 120 movements and thousands of activists.

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Legal abortion advances, except in the U.S. (and Bolivia)

It was inconceivable, five years ago, that a conservative country like Colombia would eliminate the crime of abortion from the penal code (up to the 24th week of pregnancy). Or that Catholic and neoliberal Chile would vote for a constitution that enshrines sexual and reproductive rights, including voluntary abortion.

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Abortion rights in Latin America advance and regress at the same time

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.

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