Bogota, Colombia – The choice doctors presented to Martha Gonzalez when they told her she had uterine cancer was almost unimaginably painful: Abort your fetus or die.
Colombian law at the time made the decision for her. Abortion was outlawed, no exceptions. She gave birth, and the 34-year-old’s cancer is now inoperable.
This week, Colombia’s highest court ruled that abortions can be allowed in certain limited cases, such as Gonzalez’s, if incest or rape is involved or if the fetus is so deformed that it would be unable to live outside the mother’s womb.
Abortion rights activists are hoping that Colombia’s move toward less strict anti-abortion laws will resonate through Latin America and spur continued liberalization in a region with some of the world’s most restrictive anti-abortion laws.
Gonzalez, a street vendor, is now spending her final months asking for donations for her four children so she can die knowing they will be housed and educated.
The landmark ruling Wednesday overturned an absolute ban on abortion that set jail terms of up to four years for women who have them. It leaves Chile and El Salvador as the only other Latin American countries to maintain a total ban.
“This change in the law could have saved my life. I just wish this law existed before,” Gonzalez said.
Aside from Cuba, which offers abortions on demand for the first 12 weeks of pregnancy, most countries in this heavily Roman Catholic region allow abortion when a woman’s life is in danger but deny it to pregnant victims of rape or incest, according to the Center for Reproductive Rights, a New York-based advocacy group that supports abortion rights.
“Generally speaking in Latin America, the abortion laws remain restricted, but recently there’s been a trend of victories for women’s rights in the region,” said Luisa Cabal, the center’s international legal director, citing Mexico and Peru in particular.
In Mexico, authorities agreed in March of this year to pay $33,000 in damages to a woman who had been denied an abortion following a rape. And in Peru, a U.N. agency ruled against the government last year for failing to offer an abortion to a woman who was forced to continue carrying a fatally deformed fetus.
“The decision established precedent in international law that denying access to legal abortion violates women’s most basic human rights,” the Center for Reproductive Rights said.
Monica Roa, the abortion-rights lawyer who brought the case before Colombia’s Constitutional Court, is hopeful Chile will follow Colombia’s lead, given the recent election of its first woman president, Michelle Bachelet.
So far it seems unlikely. Bachelet has said that “the possibility of legalizing abortion is not part of my program.” Studies indicate that some 160,000 illegal abortions are performed annually in Chile, with a mortality rate for mothers of 30 percent.
“It can’t be that in this country, the poorest women have to go through these clandestine system with no guarantee of their health and even worse are punished when they seek help for health problems resulting from the illegal abortions,” said Rosario Guzman, a Chilean abortion rights activist.
Such activists face stiff opposition elsewhere.
In Uruguay, President Tabare Vazquez has opposed any changes to the status quo, which prohibits most abortions except in extreme cases.
It is a region where abortion rights activists clash with the deeply held beliefs of Roman Catholics, whose church leaders consider any form of abortion to be a violation of life.
That’s why Roa said she made clear in her arguments that her support for abortion rights was a question of human rights and not an attack on religious values.
“I always tell people that I didn’t file the complaint against the Vatican, but filed it as a legal motion with the Constitutional Court,” she said. “We have always made clear that we are not against the church.” It will not be easy where the issue is heavily infused with religion. Roa knows the depths of opposition abortion rights activists face.
She has received death threats and suspects abortion opponents of burglarizing her apartment and making off with her computer.
She also worries that the rising rhetoric against her, including threats to excommunicate her, could end tragically.
“When this religious fundamentalism talks of the devil taking over Colombia because of abortion and then they call me the devil’s comrade, I worry that someone out there may decide to take it in to their own hands to solve the problem,” she said.
—- AP correspondents Eva Vergara and Eduardo Gallardo in Chile, Sergio De Leon in Colombia, Marcos Aleman in El Salvador and Raul Garces in Uruguay contributed to this story.
AP-WS-05-12-06 1855EDT
