From The Economist, via my friend Sean (no link, sorry, just the text; all emphasis is mine):
Last bastions – Abortion in Latin America
Challenging Colombia’s restrictive abortion laws
A challenge to Colombia’s abortion laws could lead to wider liberalisation
ONLY a handful of countries continue to ban abortion totally, even when the mother’s life is in danger. Colombia is one of them. Earlier this year, its Congress increased the maximum sentence for violators to four and a half years in prison. Yet every year, an estimated 400,000 desperate women prefer to run the risk of jail and dangerous backstreet abortions rather than give birth to an unwanted, possibly severely handicapped baby, or a child resulting from rape or incest.
Illegal abortions are the third cause of maternal mortality in this predominantly Catholic country. Colombian women’s groups have long been campaigning for decriminalisation. United Nations bodies responsible for monitoring international human-rights conventions have lent the movement their weight, arguing that Colombia’s draconian laws violate a woman’s fundamental right to life and health. Public opinion is in favour of greater liberalisation when the mother’s life or health are at risk, or when the fetus is severely deformed. Yet repeated attempts in Congress to amend Colombia’s penal code have hitherto failed.
Now Monica Roa, a young Colombian lawyer working for Women’s Link Worldwide, a women’s rights group, is seeking to mount a legal challenge for the first time. In a suit filed in the Constitutional Court, she argues that a total ban on abortion is unconstitutional and violates Colombia’s international treaty obligations. In an effort not to offend Catholics too much, she is calling for abortion to be permitted in just three instances: if the mother’s life or health are at risk, if the fetus is severely malformed, or in the case of rape.
Ms Roa claims that the chances of passing a new abortion law are now higher than at any time in Colombia’s history. She would appear to have good grounds for optimism. The Constitutional Court has already ruled in other cases that international law supersedes domestic law. International groups, including Yale and Harvard Law Schools, have filed briefs in support of her claim. And both Colombia’s procurator-general’s office and the Ministry of Social Protection have admitted that illegal abortions present a serious public health problem.
But Ms Roa’s quest has brought her up against powerful enemies. In June, her office was broken into and two computers stolen, along with confidential files. She has now been assigned two bodyguards. Human Rights Watch, a New York-based lobby group, has expressed concern about the safety of all those working on the case. Meanwhile, President Álvaro Uribe has rushed to assure the Catholic church that his signing of a treaty banning discrimination against women did not signify any support for abortion rights.
Ms Roa’s chief opponent is José Galat, elderly Catholic rector of the University of Greater Colombia. He maintains that abortion is akin to the massacres carried out by Colombia’s right-wing paramilitary groups. How can people complain about that violence if they allow mothers to assassinate the children in their wombs, he asks. He and his supporters have taken out gory advertisements featuring bloodied fetuses and have collected 2m signatures opposing any relaxation of the law.
Most countries of Central and Latin America-along with most of sub-Saharan Africa and southern Asia-have extremely restrictive abortion laws, usually allowing the termination of a pregnancy only to save a woman’s life or protect her physical health. But Ms Roa believes there is now a momentum in the region toward greater liberalisation. A decision on the legality of Colombia’s laws is due by mid-December. It could help determine whether that momentum becomes unstoppable.
I wish Ms. Roa the best of luck. She’s up against a lot when her country doesn’t allow abortion even when having a child will kill the pregnant woman, when women who terminate pregnancies face almost five years in jail, and when everyone involved seems to be bending over backwards to suit Catholic church dogma. I hope she succeeds, and eventually goes further — it’s abhorent that 400,000 women are made into criminals for trying to control their family size. Harvard and Yale have filed amicus briefs on her side; perhaps I can single-handedly convince NYU to do the same.
Similar Posts:
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- UK Stands Up For Women’s Lives by Jill February 6, 2006
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- Catholic school cancels labor leader’s talk because of her pro-choice views by Jill March 9, 2008
When I was an undergrad, I spent some time in Ecuador. I was so naive – I had no idea at the time how rare the right to abortion is worldwide. I remember having long conversations with one of my pierced, punk rock friends from the area about women’s rights, racism, and a whole bunch of other social issues. He mentioned that young women that he knew personally had had dangerous back alley abortions without telling their friends/families and that some had suffered terrible health consequences as a result.
With that story in mind, I too wish Ms. Roa the best of luck.
Maybe They’re Just Taking Their Time
A few days ago, some members of the conservative blogosphere, unfairly in my view, criticized a Feministe post on Saudi Arabia because it dared note the US has problems to. There was much harrumphing by Karol of Alarming News, Jeff Alan, Jeff Goldste…
Absolutely you should!
I’m doing a project on this for my human rights class right now – thanks so much for the article. We’re arguing that the law is a violation of one of the human rights treaties to which Colombia is a party. I’m not sure how compelling that is, but it’s something.
There’s a lot of precedent out there in the human rights courts, so I would be surprised if the court doesn’t come out in favor of liberalizing the laws, but I think the issue of actually changing the domestic law is quesitonable. One can only hope.
You know the US said the same thing when it was considering CEDAW – that women’s rights gave no right to reproductive health at all, basically. The reservation is not rare, but it certainly seems harmful, if not plain backward.
No woman’s-life exemption=execution by the state. When no crime is committed.
If this fails, I would recommend that someone push for an exemption in cases where the pregnancy will kill the mother early in the pregnancy, when the fetus is nowhere near viable.
Does anyone know if Colombia has laws requiring people to help other people who are in accidents or otherwise endangered? Can someone be arrested and charged with something if they pass by a flaming car wreck and do nothing to help the people inside? For some reason that saying about people in glass houses and stones is floating around in my head just now.
I’m not sure how compelling that is, but it’s something.
It’s certainly a compelling way to get conservative countries to refrain from signing international treaties.
The church has a frightening amount of control over Latin America, to make matters worse, the Vatican supports the view that there’s no reason to believe that even a 9-year old would be put at risk to go term and deliver a baby (even in the case of rape). After a few highly publicized (outsied the US, that is) cases in which the church has enforced cruel and archaic rules that penalize women and people with disabilities with public dissent, the church is likely to step up efforts to ensure Catholocism and secular law are one and the same so they can control the countries and mute other religions that some catholics are starting to turn to.
There’s a similar case in Poland, where a woman was denied an abortion even though she had a medical condition that would blind her if she continued the pregnancy…Poland, too, is heavily Catholic. It’s sad when the Church doesn’t really value life.
Why do sexual women scare men so badly?
What CENTURY is this? No, c’mon, really.
And Robert, this is the “go along to get along” strategy that has worked so well for the Democrats in past elections. Id rather have them not sign.
Why do sexual women scare men so badly?
We’re afraid of the teeth! The horrible slicing teeth!
Id rather have them not sign.
And thus, the perfect becomes the enemy of the good.
You can slice that particular salami until you’re severed at the wrist.
I don’t think the perfect is even on the horizon.
Here is a link to the original article
http://www.economist.com/PrinterFriendly.cfm?story_id=4489686
How interesting. I point out how the 400000 illegal abortions every year in Colombia outnumber all other deaths in that country by a factor of two to one, and the ladies at Feministe see fit not to publish that comment. I guess facts are too uncomfortable. That’s ok, I’ve got my own blog.
Ed, chill. First-time comments go into moderation and have to be approved by either Lauren or I before they get posted. This is the first time I’ve checked the comments since last night.
That said, I didn’t see any other comment in moderation from you on this post. Did you write something other than this?
Yes I did Jill. That’s the comment I referred to in (12) above. I guess Lauren must have erased it.
Why should I “chill”? Does my comment have the look of anger to it? The comment has an element of snarkiness, yes, but it is not emotionally charged.
If you want to read the rest of my comment, Jill, I copied it over to my own blog
http://robot_guy.blogspot.com/2005/10/unseen-genocide.html
prior to clicking the Submit button here.
Not anger so much as paranoia, plus the insulting attitude towards the “ladies” at feministe.
For some more info on why your comment isn’t too painful to consider so much as totally beside the point, see lefarkins’s posts on the inconsistency of pro-life argumentsf and their misreading of pro-choice viewpoints. Or just review the definition of “circular reasoning.” Also–seems to me like those 400,000 women who would be thrown in jail is a great reason not to criminalize abortion, but that’s just the murderous pro-choicer talking.
Piny, do you have a URL for lefarkin’s posts?
In 1999, 183553 people died in Colombia of all causes, not counting 400000 abortions. Put another way, abortion accounted for 2/3 of all deaths in that country that year.
How is it that putting 400000 murderers in jail is a reason to legalize murder?
I don’t know who “lefarkin” is but I doubt that he has any persuasive argument that pro-lifers are inconsistent because there is one thing that pro-lifers are not and that is inconsistent. I presume the argument is the old “oh they don’t call for putting mothers in jail so they don’t really think it’s murder” argument. There’s another thread on this site where that one is discussed ad nauseum and I’m not going to rengage that discussion here. (I suppose though that if Columbian women who abort are subject to being thrown in jail, pro-choicers should congratulate the Columbians on their consistency.)
I’m dubious in the extreme about the 400,000 stat. There are many reasons for suspicion, including the stats provided by Ed. Further, the Economist article (like the publication itself) is overtly biased toward a pro-choice position. Pro-choicers are notorious for lying about statistics (the famous episodes include the admission by the pro-choice camp that it lied concerning partial birth abortion statistics (discussed elsewhere on this site) and the similar admission by Dr. Bernard Nathanson that NARAL, which he co-founded, lied when it claimed that in the years immediately preceding Roe 5,000 women were dying a year from back alley abortions (in fact that actual number was in the low 100s (and at a rate not perceptibly different from the death rate post-Roe)). In light of this, it is suspicious that the Economist’s 400,000 stat is not backed up by any citation to anything — no study, no poll, no nothing. This suggests the possibility that this stat comes from the same place the pro-choice camp’s stats on partial birth abortion and pre-Roe death rates came from: thin air.
But let’s assume the 400,000 stat is right. The suggestion is made that it means abortion must be o.k. because so many are doing it. This is the sort of thinking that permits a society to slide further into evil. We don’t decriminalize child abuse, wife beating or anything else simply because it is common. I’ve cited this St. Augustine quote before, but I’ll do it again: “Wrong is wrong even if everyone is doing it, and right is right even if no one is.”
See here.
The problem with your argument is that pro-choicers categorically reject the idea that a fetus is a person. They therefore categorically reject the idea that four hundred thousand abortions are equivalent to four hundred thousand murders. So your argument doesn’t hold water. Insisting that we should view abortion as equivalent to murder…because abortion is equivalent to murder is textbook circular reasoning.
Oops. Here it is.
Piny, I agree, the difference between pro-lifers and pro-choicers is that pro-lifers believe all human life is sacred and worthy of protection — we believe this with all our heart and soul — and pro-choicers don’t. It’s that simple. There is no real dispute about the facts. Everyone knows life begins at conception. Pro-choicers think it’s ok to kill it off thinking it’s too small to count and we pro-lifers think the small and vulnerable and the defenseless are precisely those who need protection the most.
At the core of the pro-life position is a truth: it is wrong to take innocent human life, no matter how small, no matter how defenseless. This truth will never die. Indeed, it is really the only thing that sustains the pro-life movement. Without it, the pro-life movement would have died off long ago given that it has no majority support from any major institution apart from the Catholic Church: the media, our universities, and the major philanthropic instituions all strongly support “abortion rights” and financial support for “abortion rights” far, far exceeds that which is given to the pro-life movement (by a factor of about 100 to 1). What we have though is the truth that it is wrong to kill innocent human life. This will remain the truth no matter what the law says or what the press says or however many women in Columbia kill their unborn children.
Just a nit-pick:
Colombia is a country.
Columbia is a university.
That’s all, thank you.
Piny, was Scott Peterson charged with one murder, or two?
That you categorically reject the idea does not make the idea invalid. If the idea is valid, then it just makes you wrong.
Good post. But knowing this country as I do, and specially in the wave of conservative hysteria that has taken over it (we are at portas to aprove a relection law for our hardcore right wing president, friend – at least- of the opus dei), I doubt the cause of abortion can be seen in an optimistic light. But I agree 100% “Legalización AHORA!”