A must-read article in the Times about the growing progressive forces in Latin America, and how women’s rights groups are mobilizing for basic reproductive freedoms. It’s certainly informative; read it if only as a reminder of how much we have to lose.
In this tradition-bound Roman Catholic town one day in April, two young women did what many here consider unthinkable: pregnant and scared, they took a cheap ulcer medication known to induce abortions. When the drug left them bleeding, they were treated at a local emergency room – then promptly arrested.
That ulcer drug is one of the most commonly used illegal abortion techniques in Latin America, where abortion is outlawed in almost every country. Despite the strict anti-abortion laws, some of those countries have a higher abortion rate than the United States; many have a higher abortion rate than Western Europe, where abortion laws are fairly permissive.
Although it may seem small by United States standards, it is a seismic shift for a region where abortion is readily available only in Cuba and a few other Caribbean nations. “There is a real trend for change, particularly in South America,” said Marianne Mollman, a researcher for Human Rights Watch, which supports efforts to decriminalize abortion in Latin America. “I think it’s the end of the realization that the criminalization of abortion doesn’t lead to less abortion, but that it leads to a lot of preventable problems.”
Right on, Marianne. I worked with her when I interned at Human Rights Watch, and she’s an expert in Latin American women’s issues, having lived there for much of her life. Her point is absolutely correct: Nowhere in the world has illegalizing abortion been shown to substantially decrease abortion rates. Instead, illegalized abortion leads to serious health problems and an explosion of maternal mortality.
Women’s rights groups from New York to Buenos Aires are also closely watching the outcome of a lawsuit filed by a Colombian lawyer, Mónica Roa, with the nation’s highest court. It seeks to legalize abortion when a mother’s life is in danger, when the fetus is expected to die of abnormalities or when the pregnancy resulted from rape.
The central argument in the case – one that could set precedent – is that Colombia’s anti-abortion laws violate its international treaty obligations, which require the nation to ensure a woman’s right to life and health.
It’s stiking that in these countries, abortion is illegal even if pregnancy will kill or maim the pregnant woman. And that extreme is in fact what anti-abortion forces in the United States would like to take us to.
Regional health officials increasingly argue that tough laws have done little to slow abortions. The rate of abortions in Latin America is 37 per 1,000 women of childbearing age, the highest outside Eastern Europe, according to United Nations figures. Four million abortions, most of them illegal, take place in Latin America annually, the United Nations reports, and up to 5,000 women are believed to die each year from complications from abortions.
In an interview, a doctor in Medellín, Colombia, said that while he offered safe, if secret, abortions, many abortionists did not.
“In this profession, we see all kinds of things, like people using witchcraft, to whatever pills they can get their hands on,” said the doctor, who charges about $45 to carry out abortions in women’s homes. He spoke on condition that his name not be used, because performing an abortion in Colombia can lead to a prison term of more than four years.
“They open themselves up to incredible risks, from losing their reproductive systems or, through complications, their lives,” the doctor said.
When a woman doesn’t want to be pregnant, or knows that there is no way she can have a child, she will do what she feels needs to do, even at great danger to herself. Laws limiting or completely illegalizing abortion have no positive effects on decreasing the abortion rate. Illegalization obviously doesn’t. And even the kinds of restrictions that we try and pass here do nothing to decrease the abortion rate; they only delay abortions. Parental consent/notification laws have been shown to decrease the rate of first-trimester abortions — and increase second-trimester procedures. Mandatory waiting periods lead to the same result: A JAMA study found that a Mississippi law requiring two clinic visits before the abortion could be performed resulted in a 40 percent increase in second-trimester procedures.
The anti-choice model is not working. It hasn’t worked anywhere. On the other hand, the pro-choice model — comprehensive sex ed, available and affordable birth control, universal healthcare and aid to in-need families (so that low-income women can afford the choice to have children), and available abortion — works. It doesn’t take a rocket scientist to look around and see what’s effective and what’s not, which is why the anti-choice position is so staggeringly confusing to me. If you’re against abortion, fine — but why not try and find ways to prevent unintended pregnancies, and to give pregnant women a wider range of healthcare and financial options so that they can actually choose to give birth? Instead, they try and illegalize abortion (thereby making it more dangerous), limit access to birth control, and give kids inaccurate information about sex, while simply telling them, “don’t do it.” Again, you don’t need a particularly high IQ to figure out that such methods ain’t gonna work. But then, effectively reducing the abortion rate, and thereby preserving “life,” isn’t really what the anti-choice movement has ever been about.