We “decided to go a step further and move the debate to society as a whole…”
This interview with Ana Cristina González Vélez, one of Colombia’s leading campaigners for abortion rights, describes how the movement in Colombia advanced the struggle to win decriminalization of abortion in February. Daniel Gatti interviewed González Vélez for the Uruguayan newspaper Brecha. The ISP translated this article to English.
“Until 15 years ago, Colombia was one of the countries where abortion was totally banned. Now it is among those with one of the most advanced laws on the subject”, the feminist activist told Brecha. Years ago, González Vélez was Colombia’s public health director and later worked for several United Nations agencies. Today, she is a consultant for ECLAC (Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean). When in 2006 the Constitutional Court decriminalized the voluntary termination of pregnancies on three grounds (risk of death for the mother, fetal malformation and rape), the problem of abortion was one of the most pressing public health issues in Colombia. According to figures from Women’s Link Worldwide, some 400,000 abortions were performed every year, obviously all of them clandestine and many of them in very poor sanitary conditions. Almost a quarter of all pregnancies in Colombia ended in abortion.
That court decision 16 years ago, which came in the middle of election season and in the midst of a virulent campaign by where the Catholic Church, conservative parties and the anti-abortion movement labeled women who had abortions were genocidal,“was very brave and was a great step forward, although it left things halfway,” says González Vélez. “The ruling established that abortion was a fundamental human right of women who chose to have it in the three authorized circumstances, but at the same time left it as a crime in the Penal Code. That duality carried dangers.”
Since that decision, mortality and morbidity from abortion fell. However, the obstacles faced by Colombian women to be able to terminate their pregnancies continued to be enormous—pressure, officials’ ignorance of the law, direct persecution of women, especially in rural areas, inequality by region. On the other hand, the parliament, which since 2006 has been urged three times by the court to adopt provisions guaranteeing access to abortion, did nothing. However, lawmakers introduced some 50 bills aimed at limiting or overturning the court’s ruling.
Social debate
It was in this context that the Mesa por la Vida y la Salud de las Mujeres (Roundtable on Women’s Life and Health), an advocate since the late 1990s of the legalization of abortion, “decided to go a step further and move the debate to society as a whole,” González Vélez recalls.
In 2018, Causa Justa, a movement that brings together social activists, health care providers, university students and more than a hundred women’s, feminist and human rights associations, was launched. “Causa Justa was set up with the strategy of building arguments in law, philosophy, health, social, citizenship, democracy, to achieve the total decriminalization of abortion. We said to ourselves: ‘Let’s open the public discussion, let’s take it to the streets, to the social networks, to the media, to the academy, to the neighborhoods. We aimed to convince everyone—ordinary people, political leaders, the judicial system—that, on the one hand, criminalization was ineffective, because it did not prevent abortions, and, on the other hand, counterproductive, because it generated morbidity and mortality, and was socially unjust and discriminatory”. González Vélez believes that Causa Justa was the spearhead of one of the most far-reaching social movements in Colombia in recent years.
In October 2020, the movement filed a Constitutional Court lawsuit to declare the 2006 decision unconstitutional. “The court took 523 days to reach a decision, a time during which the pro-life groups’ lawyers put up all kinds of procedural obstacles. They asked for the lawsuit to be nullified, they challenged judges. We, meanwhile, developed an intense public discussion.”
On February 21, the court decriminalized abortion on all grounds up to 24 weeks, ruled that the issue could not be reversed and urged Congress to adopt a comprehensive policy on sexual and reproductive health. Beyond the 24th week, abortion remains a crime, but it was “a gigantic step. It placed Colombia in the last wave of liberalization, in the world vanguard on this issue,” says González Vélez.
González Vélez says that the current political climate may help to consolidate progress when the parliamentarians elected in March take office at the end of July. “It is the first time that there are so many women in Congress (30 percent of the total) and that the left and progressive sectors have such a large group of representatives. It will not be a majority, but it will be very significant. From there, and despite the fact that neither the left nor the center have really understood the feminist struggle and equality issues, it will be possible to propose, in any case, significant changes.” Francia Márquez, Gustavo Petro’s running mate in the Historical Pact slate (Ed: the center-left coalition running in the upcoming presidential elections), seems to González Vélez a very good card: “She is feminist, Black, committed to social causes”.
With a view to the presidential elections at the end of the month, the issue of the fight against abortion has practically disappeared from the campaign of the right-wing candidate, Federico Gutiérrez. “If he wants to win over the political center, he cannot be as extreme on these issues as he has always been,” says the feminist activist.
Those who have remained active have been the extreme right-wing groups. Aguilas Negras, a sort of death squad, notorious until a few years ago, reappeared to threaten to kill the five Court justices who made the February ruling. The Minister of Defense, Diego Molano, said that the organization “no longer exists” and that the flyers distributed under its name “are apocryphal”. Other authorities also questioned whether the recent death threats that Petro said he had received were real, and for which he had to suspend his campaign tour in the coffee-growing region of the country. “Social violence in Colombia continues to be appalling”, González Vélez told Brecha.
