BOGOTÁ, Colombia — Having an abortion is no longer a crime under Colombian law, the country’s top court ruled on Monday, in a decision that paves the way for the procedure to become widely available across this historically conservative, Catholic country.
The ruling by Colombia’s Constitutional Court follows years of organizing by women across Latin America for greater protections and more rights, including access to abortion, and significant shifts in the region’s legal landscape.
Mexico’s Supreme Court decriminalized abortion in a similar decision in September and Argentina’s Congress legalized the procedure in late 2020. Colombia’s decision means that three of the four most populous countries in Latin America have now opened the door to more widespread access to abortion.
It also comes at a time when the United States is moving in the opposite direction. With abortion restrictions increasing across the country and the U.S. Supreme Court looking into a case that could overrule Roe v. Wade (the 1973 ruling that established a constitutional rights to abortion),
“This puts Colombia on the vanguard in Latin America,” said Mariana Ardila, a Colombian lawyer with Women’s Link Worldwide, part of the coalition that brought one of two cases challenging the criminalization of abortion. “This is historic.”
The court’s decision decriminalizes abortions in the first 24 weeks of pregnancy, and means that any woman should be able to seek the procedure from a health professional without fear of criminal prosecution. The Colombian government can regulate the process further.
This is part of a cultural seachange in Latin America that has been sparked by grass-roots feminist movements as well as a younger, more secular generation.
In a region historically known for its Catholic faith and social conservatism, a growing push for women’s rights and abortion access gained prominence a little more than a year ago when Argentina became the largest nation in Latin America to legalize abortion.
Soon, abortion rights supporters across the region, from Mexico to Paraguay, Brazil to Colombia, were wearing or brandishing green handkerchiefs — the symbol of Argentina’s abortion rights movement — to show their solidarity with women’s sexual and reproductive rights. The handkerchiefs became symbols of the work that women’s rights lawyers and activists had been doing more quietly for years.
The Argentina decision had a reverberating effect across Latin America. It showed that it was possible for abortion to be legalized in countries with strong Catholic and Protestant beliefs and a history rich in patriarchal ideals.
In September, Mexico’s Supreme Court ruled that it was unconstitutional to make abortion a crime, helping to clear the way for the legalization of the procedure in the country of about 130 million people.
Two petitions challenging the section of the penal code that makes abortion a crime were considered by Colombia’s Constitutional Court magistrates over the past few weeks.
In one, a lawyer named Andrés Mateo Sánchez Molina said the measure violated rights protected by the Constitution, including the right to human dignity, freedom and equality.
Another, brought by Causa Justa (a coalition of abortion right groups), lawyers argued that criminalization had placed abortion in such a negative light, that it prevented women with legal rights from having one.
The coalition claimed that in some cases, health professionals denied women who were eligible for the procedure because of the criminal penalty. Some women avoided abortions in legal clinics out of fear that they would be imprisoned and instead sought risky alternatives in underground hospitals.
“These barriers affect mainly women living in rural and remote areas, low-income women, adolescent girls, women and girls living in situations of armed conflict and victims of gender violence, including physical and sexual violence,” representatives of Causa Justa wrote in a summary of their petition. The procedure was made a crime under most circumstances, they claimed.
In the end, the court decided that the Causa Justa case should be heard first. Although the second case will be heard at another time, the court cannot reverse its decision.
Hundreds of abortion rights supporters and dozens of their opponents stood outside the courthouse in Bogotá awaiting a decision on Monday afternoon.
In recent months, both sides have carried out dueling public campaigns to try to sway the decision, and their rallies came to symbolize the country’s cultural divide on the issue.
As the news moved through the crowd of women, Jonathan Silva, 32, was angered when they saw the green handkerchiefs being worn by the women. Mr. Silva, an evangelical Christian who works with Unidos Por La Vida (an anti-abortion group), said that the court had exceeded its powers and that it was a decision that should have been made by elected officials.
“What they’re decriminalizing is the killing of human beings,” he said.
Until now, abortions had been legal only in limited circumstances, laid out by a 2006 Constitutional Court decision: when a woman’s health was at risk, when a fetus had serious health problems or when a pregnancy resulted from rape. Anyone else who had an abortion — or who helped a woman obtain one — could be sentenced to 16 to 54 months in prison.
Abortion rights activists often claimed that this legal landscape created two-tiered systems: Women who were more educated could access abortions because they knew how one of the exceptions was written. Women with less education, however, had limited knowledge and the means to do so.
Prosecutors in Colombia open about 400 cases each year against women who have abortions or people who help them, according to the attorney general’s office. Since 2006, at least 346 people have been convicted of such crimes.
According to researchers at Causa Justa, almost all of these abortion-related investigations took place in rural areas. They involved girls as young as 11 years old.
Illegal abortions can be unsafe and cause about 70 deaths a year in Colombia, according to the country’s health ministry.
A recent survey by the nonpartisan firm Ipsos found that while 82 percent of Colombian respondents supported abortion in some circumstances, just 26 percent supported it in all cases — and the court’s decision is likely to cause friction as abortion rights activists, policymakers, health care providers and others determine how it should be carried out.
Other legal bodies cannot alter the decision.
Colombia’s Constitutional Court is considered by many legal experts to be more liberal than the country at large, and many recent liberal shifts, including the legalization of same-sex marriage in 2016, resulted from the court’s decisions.
The court is also considered a legal trendsetter in the region, said Francisco Bernate, a law professor at the University of Rosario in Bogotá, and the decision is likely to attract the attention of judges across Latin America.
Activists in America are also following the changes occurring in the region.
“These struggles are connected,” said Serra Sippel, the chief global advocacy officer at Fos Feminista, an alliance of reproductive rights groups that works around the world, including in the United States. “We in the U.S. can really learn a lot.”
Sofía Villamil and Megan Janetsky contributed reporting from Bogotá.
Source: NY Times
