Following a development throughout Latin America, Colombia decriminalises abortion – making it authorized as much as 24 weeks.
Bogota, Colombia – “Ya es ley.” Now it’s legislation.
That was the mantra that echoed outdoors Colombia’s Constitutional Court docket constructing Monday in a sea of inexperienced handkerchiefs.
In a landmark determination, the courtroom decriminalised abortion procedures as much as 24 weeks of gestation, paving the way in which for larger abortion entry within the largely Catholic nation.
For 15 years, Colombian legislation allowed for abortions solely beneath three circumstances: if the mom’s life was endangered, if the being pregnant was a product of rape or if the fetus was fatally deformed. After 24 weeks, those self same three exceptions apply.
“There’s not a single lady in Colombia who doesn’t know somebody who has needed to get a clandestine abortion,” stated 29-year-old Marisol Rivera, who stood outdoors the courtroom constructing Monday with a inexperienced handkerchief symbolising the pro-abortion rights motion.
“However little-by-little, we’re altering that.”
The case got here as a feminist “inexperienced wave,” referring to the brilliant inexperienced bandanas pro-choice advocates sport, sweeps throughout Latin America.
Whereas it's constructed off of many years of labor by feminist activists throughout the area, the current wave first gained velocity in Argentina, which in December 2020, handed a legislation to legalise abortion and Mexico, which decriminalised the process in September.
Different international locations similar to Ecuador additionally not too long ago loosened legal guidelines to decriminalise abortion in conditions of rape.
Advocates stated it represented a serious step ahead for ladies’s rights throughout the area, particularly as different Latin American international locations think about comparable instances.
“It’s an awakening of girls’s rights,” stated Paula Avila-Guillen, government director of Girls’s Equality Heart. “We’ve arrived at a second wherein we have been uninterested in being left behind … and simply began reclaiming our rights. For a few years we have been simply ready.”
Conservative ex-President Alvaro Uribe and different anti-abortion teams decried the choice with Uribe saying on Twitter “this ruling deeply offends the best group of (Colombian) residents.”
Jose Jaime Uscátegui, a conservative congressman, tweeted a video standing outdoors the courtroom Monday throwing bathroom paper rolls on the courtroom constructing.
“This can be a crime. Why do Colombian residents have to sit down right here silent … whereas 5 judges decide on behalf of fifty million Colombians,” he stated within the video.
Colombia’s case was based mostly on a lawsuit filed by an umbrella group of 100 organisations, known as Causa Justa Por el Aborto (“Simply Trigger for Abortion”), which sought to remove abortion from Colombia’s legal code, and have abortion regulated beneath well being legal guidelines as an alternative.
Beforehand, girls might face wherever from 16 to 54 months in jail for interrupting a being pregnant that didn't fall beneath the three exceptions.
For many years, the process was utterly banned within the South American nation.
Beatriz Quintero, the co-founder of La Mesa por la Vida y la Salud de las Mujeres (“Desk for the Life and Well being of Girls”), one of many organisations signed on to the case, received a clandestine abortion she was 18 years outdated within the Seventies when the process was criminalised.
Quintero, now 69, stated she was fortunate to have sanitary circumstances throughout her process, however was scared understanding that she might face legal costs and that she had no security ensures.
“Many ladies don’t have the identical circumstances [in their abortions], they usually undergo for it,” she stated. “There are girls who scrape collectively assets, who cover it from their households, who don’t have any assist.”
Yearly, 760,000 girls in Latin America are handled for issues from clandestine abortions, knowledge from the Guttmacher Institute exhibits. Such abortions account for one in 10 maternal deaths within the area.
In 2006, Colombia’s Constitutional Court docket overturned that ban and partially decriminalised abortions beneath the three circumstances as above. On paper, Colombia’s legal guidelines appeared extra liberal than neighbouring international locations.
However girls – particularly in poorer and rural areas – face a labyrinth of authorized and bodily obstacles, and stigmatisation that make entry to the process nearly inconceivable.
Whereas girls in additional left-leaning city centres like Bogota have simpler entry to the process, in additional conservative rural areas, girls usually have no idea their rights and restrictions are sometimes interpreted way more rigidly.
Some fear that entry and enforcement of the laws will proceed to be cut up down that divide.
Most abortions carried out in Colombia are accomplished clandestinely, in line with Causa Justa, making them unsafe.
Prison instances of abortion have solely gone up because the legislation was modified in 2006, in line with a current report by La Mesa por la Vida y la Salud. Prison instances of abortion jumped 320 % from 130 in 2005, when there was nonetheless an all-out ban, to 416 in 2018.
Minors and ladies from rural areas have been disproportionately criminalised, the report stated, and no less than 42 % of these prosecuted have been victims of gender-based violence.
The courtroom determination on Monday marked a symbolic step ahead for the area, and will ripple to international locations like Chile, the place abortion is extremely restricted and whose president-elect, Gabriel Boris, has promised to make the process freely accessible.
But the problem has nonetheless been divisive in Colombia and far of the area.
About 60 % of Colombians assist the legalisation of the process, however solely a fourth imagine abortion ought to be utterly legalised with out limits like those at present in place, in line with a September IPSOS ballot.
In 2020, when the courtroom was final contemplating one other abortion case that maintained earlier legislation, the nation’s right-wing President Ivan Duque stated increasing abortion entry could be a “very arduous change”.
“I’m pro-life. I imagine life begins at conception,” he stated.
Regardless of Argentina’s legalisation, many medical doctors within the nation have continued to refuse to carry out the process on ethical grounds, spurring on issues by observers that the identical might occur in Colombia or Mexico.
“There may be all the time going to be a physician that's going to train conscientious objection,” stated Paula Avila-Guillen of the Girls’s Equality Heart.
Nonetheless, for Quintero, who had a clandestine abortion many years in the past, the choice marks an indication of change not simply in her nation, however throughout the area.
“These choices present that the world is transferring ahead,” Quintero stated.
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