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Colombia has decriminalised abortion through the first 24 weeks of being pregnant, including to a latest string of authorized victories for reproductive rights in Latin America.
The South American nation’s constitutional court docket dominated 5 towards 4 to decriminalise the process on Monday night. The choice follows a collection of rulings in Mexico and Argentina that lowered obstacles to abortion.
Beforehand, abortion in Colombia was allowed solely the place there was a danger to the life or well being of the pregnant mom; the existence of life-threatening foetal malformations; or when the being pregnant was the results of rape, incest or non-consensual synthetic insemination.
“We have fun this ruling as a historic victory for the ladies’s motion in Colombia that has fought for many years for the popularity of their rights,” stated Erika Guevara-Rosas, Americas director at Amnesty Worldwide, in a press release. “Girls, ladies and folks in a position to bear youngsters are the one ones who ought to make selections about their our bodies.”
“Now, as an alternative of punishing them, the Colombian authorities should recognise their autonomy over their our bodies and their life plans,” Guevara-Rosas, went on to say.
Because the ruling was handed down, protesters in favour of entry to abortion clad in inexperienced – the color adopted by the pro-choice motion – celebrated in entrance of Colombia’s constitutional court docket in downtown Bogotá, the capital. Anti-abortion protesters additionally demonstrated towards the ruling.
Abortion rights teams, collectively often called the Inexperienced Wave, sued to have abortion faraway from the penal code. The motion had beforehand seen the constitutional court docket determine to not rule on the matter a number of instances prior to now two years.
Reproductive rights teams estimate that as many as 400,000 abortions are carried out every year in Colombia, with solely 10% carried out legally. Throughout 2020, at the very least 26,223 unsafe abortions had been carried out throughout Colombia, in line with Profamilia – a neighborhood reproductive healthcare supplier.
Based on Causa Justa, a Colombian ladies’s rights coalition, at the very least 350 ladies had been convicted or sanctioned for abortions between 2006 and mid-2019, together with at the very least 20 ladies below the age of 18.
Latin America, a historically conservative area with a robust Catholic and evangelical Christian foyer, has among the world’s most restrictive abortion legal guidelines, usually banning the process outright. In El Salvador, dozens of ladies have been jailed for murder after struggling obstetric emergencies.
“We applaud the constitutional court docket’s authorized and political braveness in recognising that girls and ladies should not second-class residents,” stated Paula Avila-Guillen, a global human rights lawyer and government director of the Girls’s Equality Middle, based mostly in New York. “In constitutionally defending our autonomy over our personal our bodies and lives, the court docket is altering the lives of tens of millions of susceptible ladies and ladies disproportionally harmed by abortion restrictions.”
“We have fun with Colombia’s Inexperienced Wave motion because the nation turns into the third Latin American nation to decriminalise abortion within the final two years,” Avila-Guillen stated. “We all know it will have a ripple impact in different international locations in Latin America which have but to take this step towards human rights and social justice.”
Mexico’s supreme court docket decriminalised abortion final 12 months, whereas parliamentarians in Ecuador final week eased laws which now enable entry to abortion in circumstances of rape.
“Whereas right now we’re celebrating this historic choice, the Inexperienced Wave is powerful and rising, and the struggle for reproductive rights and justice won’t finish till each particular person can entry high-quality sexual and reproductive healthcare when and the place they want it,” stated Eugenia Lopez Uribe, the Worldwide Deliberate Parenthood Basis’s regional director for Americas and the Caribbean area, in a press release.
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