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Abstract
Latin America's transition to democracy in the 1970s and 1980s was accompanied by the increased political participation of women, who demanded not only equal rights, but also insisted that addressing women's specific interests was key to establishing a truly representative democracy. Many in the Latin American women's movement saw the right to safe, legal abortion as fundamental. To date, their demand for this has gone largely unfulfilled, except in Cuba. There is no panacea to rescinding punitive abortion laws. However, the region is currently witnessing shifts in government policies on abortion, both progressive and retrogressive, which suggest that there is potential for substantive reform.
This article will use the recent experiences of Colombia, Mexico City, and Nicaragua to highlight shared challenges, establish linkages with other countries in the region, and demonstrate that the many different strategies which have been adopted present an opportunity to expand access to safe, legal abortion throughout Latin America.
Notes
1. The legalisation of divorce is a recent phenomenon in the region. For decades the Catholic Church hierarchy, arguing on the basis of the sanctity of marriage, had presented stiff opposition to advocates for legalising divorce. Chile only legalised divorce in 2004, Argentina in 1987, and Brazil in 1977.
2. It should of course be noted that the Church's influence on, and engagement with, governments in Latin America pre-dates the military regimes of the last century (Htun 2003, 30). In the early 1960s the Vatican hosted the Second Vatican Council, which effectively modernised aspects of Church practices. It also emphasised women's relative equality to men and their importance within the Church. However, equality was always understood within the context of the family and home, and did not extend to support for women's individual rights. While there were some very modest improvements for women under military governments in Latin America – family law reforms and women's property rights – the authoritarian regimes wholeheartedly embraced the Church's traditional view of women as good mothers and wives and did not grant women additional individual rights (ibid., 33).
3. Cardinal Miguel Obando y Bravo, the former cardinal of Managua, led the march of Catholics and evangelicals numbering in the tens of thousands to the National Assembly, two weeks before the elections.
4. Therapeutic abortion was not regulated under Nicaraguan law; rather it was guided by an official Health Ministry norm that permitted the procedure for risk to the life or health of the woman, or for malformation of the foetus.
5. A 2007 report on abortion in Nicaragua by Human Rights Watch concluded it was unlikely that anyone had been prosecuted for providing or receiving an abortion (M⊘llmann Citation2007).
6. Based on the 2007 Pan-American Health Organization (PAHO) report ‘Derogation of Therapeutic Abortion in Nicaragua: Impact on Health’, citing Nicaragua's Health Ministry (Aguilar Citation2007). Human Rights Watch noted that ‘Nicaragua's Health Ministry estimates that formerly 10 percent of all pregnancies ended in an abortion or miscarriage, totaling approximately 7,500 abortions and miscarriages in 2005’, and that ‘the remaining abortions and miscarriages treated in the public health system in 2005 were: 397 ectopic pregnancies (not officially classified as abortion), 232 cases of molar pregnancies, 1183 other abnormal pregnancies, 211 miscarriages, 49 other abortions, and over 5,400 non-classified abortions, some of which might have originally been induced illegally’ (M⊘llmann Citation2007).
7. Human Rights Watch has documented the deleterious consequences of the one year ban, including the denial of access to life- or health-saving services (M⊘llmann Citation2007).
8. The critical role of women in the Nicaraguan revolution is well documented; they comprised 30 per cent of the revolutionary forces, were politically active, and provided logistical and back-up support to combatants. See Molyneux Citation1985.
9. Indeed, a 1997 decision by Colombia's Constitutional Court went so far as to cite a papal encyclical to legally justify penalising abortion (Roa Citation2006).
10. A 2003 survey of Colombian men and women who self-identified as Catholics demonstrated they condone abortion when: the woman's life is in danger (73 per cent), the woman's health is at risk (65 per cent), in cases of serious physical or mental foetal impairment (61 per cent), and/or the pregnancy is the result of rape (52 per cent) (Source:; www.catholicsforchoice.org/news/pr/2005/20050414colombiaabortion.asp (last accessed April 2008); Women's Human Rights Net Citation2005).
11. The Center for Reproductive Rights successfully argued two cases of abortion based on international human-rights law. ‘In K.L. v. Peru, the United Nations Human Rights Committee found the Peruvian government at fault for its failure to ensure access to legal abortion services. The plaintiff in that case was a young woman who was forced by state employed health officials to carry a fatally impaired fetus to term. In a similar case in Mexico, brought before the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights, the Mexican government agreed to a settlement ensuring reparations for a 13-year-old rape victim who was denied access to a legal abortion’ (Citation2006). ‘Landmark decision by Colombia's highest court liberalizes one of the world's most restrictive abortion laws’, www.reproductiverights.org/pr_06_0511colombia.html (last accessed February 2008).
12. Roa also emphasised that in addition to the work of the Colombian women's movement, the international women's movement was fundamental in developing the international human-rights standards that comprised the basis of her case (Women's Human Rights Net Citation2005).
13. Abortion is regulated under Mexico's penal code which criminalises abortion, though all of the county's 32 states have provisions decriminalising the procedure for rape, and many others also include exceptions for the health or life of the mother; malformation of the foetus; and even for economic reasons.
14. For more on the PAN and the Catholic Church see Gonzalez Ruiz's Citation2001.
15. The bill not only reduced the sentences for abortions after 12 weeks from one to three years of imprisonment to three to six months or 100 days of community service, but it also stipulated that pregnancy begins at implantation, a critical definition which helps ‘to determine gestational age as well as reinforce the legality of assisted reproduction, investigation in embryos and therapeutic cloning’ (Barraza Citation2007).
