While the U.S. rolls back abortion rights,
Shame on you killing babies!
You're a murderer. You're a murderer.
You're a murderer.
across some parts of Latin America
the opposite is happening.
So how did a conservative region with strong Catholic roots
manage to increase abortion access?
And is there anything U.S. activists can learn?
You can get paralyzed because you don't have legal abortion.
So you don't have to be paralyzed.
Let's get one thing straight:
Abortion access across Latin America varies.
Some countries ban abortion unless it's the result of rape
or the pregnant woman's life is at risk.
And a few countries have outlawed abortion in all cases
with no exceptions, like El Salvador,
where women have been jailed
for miscarriages or stillborn births.
Our fight at this point of the story is characterized by a diversity
and a variety of strategies that we are operating
all together to move in any direction.
So what are some strategies that activists in the region
focused on in their fight for reproductive justice?
The vital first step:
The groundwork for reproductive freedom began decades ago.
This is partly because of a rich history of activist organizing across Latin America.
Unlike the U.S., where a lot of focus is on
whether or not courts find abortion bans unconstitutional,
change in Latin American countries comes from the ground up.
We work together as a region.
So we have this tradition of exchanges experiences, and even symbols.
Let's start in Argentina, a country with deep roots in Roman Catholicism.
There, activists built up networks of organizers across the country.
Leading the fight on the ground
was the National Campaign for the Right to Legal, Safe and Free Abortion.
They're an umbrella group of dozens of individual organizations
that sought to unify activists.
And unity among activists was important
because women weren't just facing restrictive abortion access.
They were also facing unprecedented levels of femicide.
In fact, at least nine of the 25 countries with the highest
femicide rates are in Latin America.
Ni Una Menos began as a rallying call -
"not one less" - referring to the crisis of gender violence in the country.
After Ni Una Menos, we had a kind of explosion.
So we started to grow and grow and grow and grow.
Activists quickly recognized that fighting against femicide
also meant fighting for abortion access.
At the beginning, I think we never imagined
what was going to happen.
Like, we never imagined a massive mobilization.
And at the end of 2020, Argentina's Congress legalized abortion
until 14 weeks of pregnancy.
Next door in more secular Uruguay, feminist groups partnered together
with medical groups, community-based organizations and trade unions.
Latin America is a region that has a long tradition
of encuentros feministas - feminist encounters.
And those encounters are like spaces and places where feminists
from many different countries exchanges strategies.
But there's one big difference in how the U.S. fought for abortion access
and how Argentina and Uruguay did.
Roe v. Wade was argued on the basis of a pregnant woman's right to privacy.
So basically, a person's right to choose whether or not to have an abortion.
But in both Uruguay and Argentina,
activists say that argument alone was not persuasive enough.
We didn't convince people with the argument "my body, my choice."
And this is where the second lesson comes in: Viewing abortion bans as a
and not just a personal affair.
Organizers focused on educating
the Argentine public on the health issues at stake.
For example, government figures estimated up to half a million abortions
were happening each year before legalization in 2020.
And complications from illegal and unsafe abortions
was a leading cause of maternal mortality in the country.
This was also the case in Uruguay, where unsafe abortion caused
an estimated 40% of maternal deaths in 2000.
Well before legalization, doctors in Montevideo began counseling
pregnant women on how to manage medication abortion - the use of abortion pills.
Even though abortion was illegal,
the woman that has an unwanted pregnancy was a citizen,
and she has all the right to go to doctor or go to a midwife
and have information.
Medication abortion is low risk
and has a high success rate.
Women could purchase the medicine themselves, and doctors
counseled women with unplanned
pregnancies on their options.
We have to empower women
and give information.
In 2004, Uruguay's Ministry of Health formally
adopted this harm reduction approach of using abortion pills
before finally legalizing abortion in the first 12 weeks of pregnancy in 2012.
Activists in the region had been working to get one message across:
that banning abortions doesn't actually end the practice.
Because women are going to have an abortion.
It doesn't matter what the legal prohibitions are.
And we know from the public health data
that those abortion are going to be unsafe.
And this leads us to lesson three:
This is where Colombia enters the picture.
There, organizers focused on abortion access as a tool for equity.
We don't need the criminal law to regulate abortion.
Because the criminal law and the crime of abortion
is unfair, is counterproductive, is discriminatory.
So with regard to access,
we made a huge emphasis on barriers. Women were facing barriers.
In 2017, Ana Cristina
helped pioneer a movement called Causa Justa Por el Aborto.
The movement became a coalition
that brought different reproductive justice organizations and activists together, some with
over 40 years of experience, to decriminalize abortion.
Causa Justa filed a lawsuit with Colombia's Constitutional Court
to remove abortion crime from the penal code.
They argued that the people most harmed by an abortion ban were:
the most vulnerable, the young women, the rural women,
the less educated women, as it happens in many other areas of criminal law.
The Constitutional Court agreed.
In 2022, Colombia legalized abortion up to 24 weeks of pregnancy.
Across the region, more change is on the horizon.
Some countries are linking abortion access to democracy.
Like Chile, where the new leadership wants to enshrine abortion
rights in the new constitution.
But as the U.S. moves in the opposite direction,
human rights experts worry the rolling back of protections
could weaken rights around the world.
So advice from Latin America is not to see Roe as an end,
but as a start of a new fight -
one that activists south of the border will be there to support.
You can get, how do you say in English?
Paralyzed because you don't have legal abortion.
So you don't have to be paralyzed. But you are still working.
For us in Argentina, the international support was very important.
What do you need?
We will be here to support your struggle and support you.