Pro-choice supporters danced outside Colombia's constitutional court in downtown Bogotá, the capital, after it decriminalised abortion during the first 24 weeks of pregnancy.
Judges ruled five against four to decriminalise the procedure in the South American country after rulings in Mexico and Argentina also lowered barriers to abortion.
Anti-abortion protesters demonstrated against the ruling
Continue reading...With reproductive rights being increasingly restricted in Europe, people are relying on a network of volunteers to help them
When The Handmaid’s Tale first came out in 1985, the initial response was broadly that people thought such threats to women’s bodies and reproductive rights “couldn’t happen here”. By the time it aired as a TV series in 2017, just after Donald Trump was inaugurated in the US, people were no longer so sure. With every headline about gains in reproductive rights – Ireland repealing the eighth amendment in 2018, which had effectively banned abortions – there are others that underscore how fragile these rights are, wherever you live.
Recent changes to abortion law in Texas, which have prohibited abortions after six weeks – one of the most restrictive rules in the nation – and Poland’s near total ban on the procedure last year make it clear just how slippery the slope still is. We have to ask: what kind of country do we want to live in? A democratic one in which every individual is free to make decisions concerning their health and body, or one in which half the population is free and the state corrals the bodies of the other half?
Continue reading...A roundup of the coverage of the struggle for human rights and freedoms, from Myanmar to Mexico
Continue reading...Can two strangers, one anti-abortion, the other pro-choice, find some common ground?
David, 31, near Norwich
Occupation Anti-abortion campaigner
Continue reading...‘Elsy’ was sentenced to 30 years for aggravated homicide over miscarriage and is fifth such woman to be released since December
El Salvador has released another woman imprisoned for aggravated homicide who after suffering an obstetric emergency was accused of aborting her pregnancy in a country where abortion under any circumstances is banned.
The woman, who activists helping her identified only as Elsy, had served more than a decade of a 30-year sentence. She was the fifth woman released before completion of her sentence since late December of last year.
Continue reading...Family of Agnieszka T say they want to ‘save other women in Poland from a similar fate’, as case met with anger over restrictive termination laws
Protests are under way across Poland after the death of a 37-year-old woman this week who was refused an abortion, a year since the country introduced one of the most restrictive abortion laws in Europe.
On the streets of Warsaw on Tuesday night, protesters laid wreaths and lanterns in memory of Agnieszka T, who died earlier that day. She was pregnant with twins when one of the foetus’ heartbeat stopped and doctors refused to carry out an abortion. In a statement, her family accused the government of having “blood on its hands”. Further protests are planned in Częstochowa, the city in southern Poland where the mother-of-three was from.
Continue reading...Xiomara Castro’s inauguration will cap a remarkable rise but she faces daunting challenges around femicide and abortion
Xiomara Castro has been sworn in as the first female president of Honduras on Thursday, marking the culmination of a remarkable rise to power that began just over 12 years ago when she led a massive protest movement in response to the ousting of her husband, former president Manuel “Mel” Zelaya, in a military-backed coup.
Castro’s resounding victory in the 28 November election has generated hope for a new era for women in the country with the highest rate of femicide in Latin America and some of the region’s most draconian laws with regards to reproductive rights.
Continue reading...Family says young mother’s health deteriorated rapidly after the twins she was carrying died a week apart in the womb
The family of a Polish woman who died on Tuesday after doctors refused to perform an abortion when the foetus’s heart stopped beating have accused the government of having “blood on their hands”.
The woman, identified only as Agnieszka T, was said to have been in the first trimester of a twin pregnancy when she was admitted to the Blessed Virgin Mary hospital in Częstochowa on 21 December. Her death comes a year after Poland introduced one of the most restrictive abortion laws in Europe.
Continue reading...As new laws hit the most vulnerable pregnant women in need of care, volunteers struggle to help those unable to access safe abortions
Continue reading...Monika was too busy with her young family to join the early protests against Poland’s strict abortion laws. But when she became pregnant with her fourth child, she realised she had to act
It is Saturday afternoon, and the centre of Chełm, a Polish city on the Ukrainian border, is empty except for one woman and her toddler. A monument to “the fallen sons” of the 1920 Polish-Soviet war marks the middle of the market square, surrounded by two churches, a few closed restaurants, and a boarded-up wooden booth with a sign reading, “cheap footwear”. The Catholic Basilica – a former Eastern Orthodox church – dominates the landscape and, locals say, the social life of the town.
Chełm is in one of the poorest areas in Poland, a stronghold of the ruling nationalist Law and Justice party, where the birthrate is -6.1 and people in their 60s comprise the largest age group. The city – once among Poland’s most religiously and ethnically diverse, with a pre-2nd?second world war population split evenly between Poles, Ukrainians, and Jews – was the site of one of the first postwar anti-Jewish Pogroms and, more recently, among the first local councils to declare itself an “LGBT-free zone.”
Continue reading...In one case, a doctor whose name was published by Indiana group was warned by FBI of kidnapping threat against her daughter
An Indiana group whose anti-abortion campaign was endorsed in a signed advertisement by Amy Coney Barrett before she became a supreme court justice, keeps a published list of abortion providers and their place of work on its website, in what some experts say is an invitation to harass and intimidate the doctors and their staff.
In one case, court records show, a doctor whose name was published by the group, which is called Right to Life Michiana, was warned by the FBI of a kidnapping threat that had been made online against her daughter.
Continue reading...‘Remarkable woman’ Weddington hailed for role in 1973 case that established right to abortion
Tributes were paid to Sarah Weddington after the attorney who argued and won the landmark Roe v Wade case at the supreme court, establishing the right to abortion, died aged 76.
Susan Hays, a former student of Weddington’s and a Democratic candidate for Texas agriculture commissioner, announced on Twitter that Weddington died on Sunday morning “after a series of health issues”.
Continue reading...Laali and Meenakshi’s unborn daughters are among the country’s 46 million ‘missing’ women and girls over the past 50 years
Laali was alone at home when she realised her legs were drenched in blood. The bleeding did not stop for eight hours. As she fell unconscious, the 25-year-old thought she would die alongside the foetus she was losing.
She had been three months pregnant when she was taken for prenatal sex determination. “When I learned it was a girl, I started feeling as though I was suffocating,” she says.
Continue reading...Texan lawyer and Linda Coffee won landmark 1973 case, safeguarding right now under threat from US supreme court
Sarah Weddington, an attorney who argued and won the Roe v Wade supreme court case which established the right to abortion in the US, has died aged 76.
Susan Hays, a Democratic candidate for Texas agriculture commissioner, announced the news on Twitter on Sunday and the Dallas Morning News confirmed it.
Continue reading...The highest court in the US has been defied by a group of extremist Republicans openly flouting the court’s own rulings
Sonia Sotomayor, the liberal-leaning justice on the US supreme court, put it plainly. For almost three months, lawmakers in the Republican-controlled legislature of Texas had “substantially suspended a constitutional guarantee: a pregnant woman’s right to control her own body”.
“The court should have put an end to this madness months ago,” Sotomayor said.
Continue reading...A short history of the Rose decision’s emergence as a signature cause for the right
Public opinion on abortion in the US has changed little since 1973, when the supreme court in effect legalized the procedure nationally in its ruling on the case Roe v Wade. According to Gallup, which has the longest-running poll on the issue, about four in five Americans believe abortion should be legal, at least in some circumstances.
Yet the politics of abortion have opened deep divisions in the last five decades, which have only grown more profound in recent years of polarization. In 2021, state legislators have passed dozens of restrictions to abortion access, making it the most hostile year to abortion rights on record.
Continue reading...A roundup of the struggle for human rights and freedoms, from Mexico to Manila
Continue reading...Proposed register would come into effect in January, a year after near-total ban on abortion
Poland is planning to introduce a centralised register of pregnancies that would oblige doctors to report all pregnancies and miscarriages to the government.
The proposed register would come into effect in January 2022, a year after Poland introduced a near-total ban on abortion.
Continue reading...Inter-American court of human rights orders Central American country to reform harsh policies on reproductive health
The Inter-American court of human rights has ruled that El Salvador was responsible for the death of Manuela, a woman who was jailed in 2008 for killing her baby when she suffered a miscarriage.
The court has ordered the Central American country to reform its draconian policies on reproductive health.
Continue reading...Case poses a direct threat to the legal underpinnings of the landmark 1973 Roe v Wade ruling that guaranteed the constitutional right to abortion
Conservative justices in the US supreme court have signaled their support for curbing abortion access during oral arguments in the most important reproductive rights case in decades, threatening the future of abortion access across the country.
Campaigners have warned the case poses a direct threat to the legal underpinnings of Roe v Wade, a landmark 1973 decision that guaranteed the constitutional right to abortion. In their lines of questioning on Wednesday, liberal justices warned against abandoning important legal precedent, while conservatives argued for reviewing it.
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