Latin America and Abortion

And when we talk about these 2 things, we are also forced to bring up the RCC. If they want to try and set the agenda, they get to take on some of the blame.

Brazil:

Just weeks after Pope Benedict denounced government-endorsed contraception during a visit to Brazil, President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva unveiled a program on Monday to provide inexpensive birth-control pills at 10,000 private drugstores across the country.

Silva said the plan will give poor Brazilians “the same right that the wealthy have to plan the number of children they want.”

Way to go, Silva. Brazilian has an astoundingly high abortion rate — higher than the U.S. rate — and abortion is generally illegal there. Unsurprisingly, about 4,000 Brazilian women die from illegal abortions every year, and many more are injured. Accessible birth control will certainly help. But attitudes about birth control and sex can be pretty influential. The Catholic Church isn’t doing much to help on that end.

That is nice of the church. Thousands are dying, but the Church knows where the fault is and where the priorities are.


Colombia:

Pro-lifers: They love children so much, they’ll do everything in their power to force an 11-year-old rape and incest victim to give birth against her will, after she was impregnated by her step-father.

Anti-choice activsts staged a protest against abortion rights in Colombia this week — to mark the one-year anniversary of a legal decision that allows abortion for rape and incest survivors and women who face serious health- and life-threatening complications if they carry the pregnancy to term.

The article I linked to, from an anti-choice website, says that “Abortion was legalized on May 10, 2006, when the court decided to allow abortion in cases of rape and in case of any risk to the mother’s health. The ambiguity of the ruling effectively made room for abortion in almost any situation.”

That actually isn’t true at all, but the fact that anti-choicers will straight-up lie isn’t exactly news. And while these fine “pro-life” individuals are protesting the rights of incest and rape survivors to terminate pregnancies and of pregnant women taking steps to preserve their own health, Colombia — and Latin America in general — continues to face a substantial public health crisis with regard to clandestine abortion. According to the last available statistics from the World Health Organization, unsafe abortion is the third leading cause of maternal death in Colombia. Despite the total illegality of abortion in Colombia before last year, one in four Colombian women between the ages of 15 and 55 has terminated a pregnancy. Almost half of adolescent Colombian girls under the age of 19 has had an abortion.

Before the ruling a year ago, Colombia, Chile and El Salvador where the only three countries in Latin America to prohibit abortion entirely — no exceptions for rape, incest, health or life. Now Colombia is off that list because it offers these very limited exceptions. Unfortunately, it’s been replaced by Nicaragua.

Colombia’s restrictive abortion policies did nothing to decrease the abortion rate. Making abortion accessible to rape and incest survivors and to women whose health and lives are threatened by pregnancy is a small step in the right direction, but it’s a significant one. It’s a decision that has undoubtedly saved lives.

And yet “pro-lifers” oppose it. They organize against it. They’re so pro-life that they would rather have rape and incest survivors, and women who face serious physical consequences from pregnancy, seek out illegal abortions that are known to be physically harmful or even deadly. I really shouldn’t be surprised by this stuff anymore, and I suppose I’m not — but I’m still thoroughly disgusted and deeply repulsed.

These are the same “pro-life” people who:

-Opposed the right of a nine-year-old rape victim to terminate the pregnancy that resulted from her assault. After a trying bureaucratic process the little girl was finally allowed to have an abortion (while this is common sense, it should probably be pointed out that a nine-year-old’s body is not usually particularly well-equipped for childbirth, and having a baby could have done her serious harm). One cardinal went so far as to excommunicate everyone involved with the girl’s abortion. Then the Nicaraguan Catholic bishops sent out a letter comparing abortion to terrorists bombing buses. At the time this case was at issue, Nicaragua had a law permitting therapeutic abortions to save the pregnant woman’s life — a law that many “pro-life” leaders didn’t love, but said was sufficient. Between 1991 and 2003, a grand total of 10 legal abortions were performed in Nicaragua. In the meantime, 36,000 illegal abortions were being performed every year. Last year, Nicaragua completely illegalized abortion, even to save the life of the pregnant woman. Women who terminate pregnancies may now go to jail for six years — not quite as steep as the outgoing president’s ideal of 30 years, or the Church’s proposal of 20. Abortion remains a leading cause of death for women in Nicaragua.

-Imprison Chilean women for terminating pregnancies — mostly poor women who seek out dangerous clandestine abortions. Abortion is completely illegal in Chile, and yet it has twice the abortion rate of Canada — and half the population. When women’s health advocates offered sexual health education and contraception to women impoverished communities, the abortion rate in those communities dropped as much as 82 percent.

-Support policies that lead to situations like this:

A community organizer in Argentina told me: “You will not believe what women end up putting in their uteruses to abort.” I wish I didn’t.

I have spoken to women who used knives, knitting needles, rubber tubes, even pieces of wood to pry open their uteruses. Some got access to abortive medicines that in theory lower the possibility of direct infection but that caused serious complications when they took them without medical assistance. Affluent women suffered fewer traumatic ordeals, often traveling to the U.S. for the procedure or sneaking off to upscale private Latin America clinics where, on paper, they had surgery for appendicitis.

I’m sure the “Jill the abortion blogger” thing gets old.* I know regular readers have read the same “pro-lifers don’t actually care about life” statement a million times, supported by the cruel and often deadly pro-life policy or position du jour. I know there’s a whole lot more to feminism, and to reproductive rights, than abortion laws. But damn. You’ve gotta have a special kind of cold heart to not be deeply disturbed by some of this. And you have to be a special kind of depraved to support this vision of a “pro-life” world.

*This is perhaps obvious by now, but reproductive justice is pretty much what I want to spend my professional life working on. Hence the continued obsession with international reproductive rights — it’s not because I think it’s the only important aspect of feminism or even the most important one, it’s just the one that I’m the most interested in and the one that I have the most information about. Which hopefully explains “Jill the abortion blogger” (but please don’t start calling me that).

With all that Colombians have to go through, persisting in allowing this type of suffering to continue is unconscionable.

Especially when it is on religious grounds.