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Latin America: feminists continue fight for abortion rights in 2023 [1]

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Date: 2023-03

Last year, while US conservatives led the Supreme Court to remove constitutional protection for abortion, feminists across Latin America and the Caribbean moved several governments in the opposite direction.

But the powerful movement behind such progressive change faces difficult challenges in 2023, including safeguarding hard-won rights and overcoming the disparity of abortion policies between different countries.

Feminists are defending rights that “are permanently being disputed”, Giselle Carino told openDemocracy. Carino, who is Argentinian and based in New York, is the CEO of Fòs Feminista, an international alliance of sexual and reproductive rights groups.

“The key is to support feminist movements, as they are always at the forefront of the struggle and will be the ones to sustain the changes achieved,” she explained.

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Abortion rights won…

Abortion was legalised in Argentina in 2020 – a victory for the ‘Green Wave’ movement born in the country two years before. The movement (named after the green-coloured bandanas abortion activists wear) is now a mass phenomenon that has infused new energy into feminist movements across the world – particularly in Latin America.

Following in the footsteps of Argentina’s success, over the past two years abortion activists in Mexico have succeeded in getting eight states to recognise the legal right of women and girls to exercise their capacity to choose if they want a child or not.

Three of these victories came in 2022, and a total of ten of the country’s 32 states now allow abortion, generally up to week 12 or 14. The activists also won a landmark ruling in 2021, when the Supreme Court declared the criminalisation of abortion unconstitutional.

“The future we hope for is that our struggle continues to advance both legally and socially,” Fanny González, the founder of Legal Abortion Mexico, told openDemocracy.

In Colombia, abortion advocates were behind the Constitutional Court’s ruling in February that decriminalised abortion up to 24 weeks. Just Cause, an umbrella movement of more than 100 groups and thousands of activists from across the country, presented evidence-based arguments to the court and helped to change the legal and social status of abortion in the country.

Last November in Puerto Rico, abortion rights activists successfully drove Congress to reject four bills that were intended to restrict abortion access and punish those who’d had terminations.

… but bans and restrictions remain

However, it hasn’t all been smooth sailing for feminists in Latin America and the Caribbean.

Abortion activists have yet to change the oppressive systems that continue to see women as incapable of making decisions about their bodies. Some 83% of Latin American and Caribbean women of reproductive age live in countries with some sort of restrictive abortion laws.

In the Dominican Republic, El Salvador, Haití, Honduras, Jamaica, Nicaragua and Surinam, abortion is banned completely. In El Salvador, women can face up to 50 years in prison if they have a miscarriage or stillbirth. In Honduras, every day three girls under the age of 14 become mothers as a result of rape. They are not allowed to have an abortion.

But as Indiana Jiménez, communications director for Dominican NGO Profamilia, which offers sexual and reproductive services, explains, in many of these countries the right to abortion “is not necessarily the main priority for women”. They have to deal with daily problems of “access to water, food, work, and brutal domestic violence within their families”, she told openDemocracy.

In such circumstances, she said, what “comes first and covers everything is teaching comprehensive sexual education”.

In Belize, Bolivia, Brazil, Costa Rica, Ecuador, Guatemala, Panama, Paraguay, Peru, Trinidad and Tobago and Venezuela, abortion is allowed in limited circumstances – most commonly when the health or life of the woman is at risk.

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[1] Url: https://www.opendemocracy.net/en/5050/latin-america-caribbean-abortion-rights-feminists/

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