Pilar Duran and Alex Polania are devout Catholics who have long equated abortion to murder but recently joined a growing campaign to ease Colombia’s strict anti-abortion law.
Their views on abortion changed last month after their second child, Sara, was born with severe mental and physical disabilities, likely to die within weeks.
The couple now say they would have aborted the pregnancy if they had known their child was disabled.
“When I first held my baby, and they told me she would not survive, my mind changed at that moment,” said Duran, 36, tears streaming down her face. “She is going through so much suffering. Aborting a deformed fetus would be an act of love.”
The public fight over abortion that has raged for decades in the United States has finally reached this intensely Catholic nation where the practice is outlawed but up to 400,000 clandestine, and often unsafe, abortions are carried out each year.
Monica Roa, 29, a lawyer, ignited the debate in April when she filed a lawsuit in Colombia’s Constitutional Court challenging the constitutionality of the nation’s abortion ban.
Roa argues that the ban, while rarely enforced, stigmatizes the practice and forces impoverished women to abort fetuses using coat hangers, herbal remedies and other crude methods that cause infection, infertility and sometimes the death of the expectant mother.
Health officials and other experts say complications from unsafe abortions are the third-ranking cause of maternal mortality in Colombia, leading advocates to argue that legalizing abortion would sharply reduce the health risk to women.
`They die’
“The problem with illegal abortions in Colombia is not that women go to jail,” said Roa, a lawyer for Women’s Link Worldwide, an international women’s rights group. “The problem is that they die.”
Still, while Roa favors decriminalizing abortion in all cases, she is only asking the court to bring Colombia in line with most other Latin American countries, which allow abortion for rape victims or when a pregnancy represents a grave risk to the life and health of the mother.
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Roa said she limited her request to increase the chance of a favorable ruling. If she wins the case, she hopes guidelines can be written broadly enough to decriminalize abortion for teens and other vulnerable groups.
She also is asking the justices to legalize abortions when the fetus is deformed and cannot survive outside the womb. One example Roa cited is anencephaly, a rare and fatal condition where fetuses don’t develop most of their brains.
“I’m not talking about Down’s syndrome or someone with six fingers,” Roa explained. “I’m taking about a fetus that will die within hours or days of birth.”
But that explanation hasn’t stopped Colombia’s powerful Roman Catholic Church from accusing Roa of trying to legalize eugenics.
“If we would accept the principle that a deformed child doesn’t have the right to life, we would be taking part in a kind of Nazism,” said Fabian Marulanda, secretary general of the Colombian Conference of Bishops.
In recent months, activists on both sides of the abortion issue have squared off on television talk shows, at public forums and in raucous street demonstrations.
El Tiempo, Colombia’s leading newspaper, published a lengthy editorial in August supporting Roa’s lawsuit, which the court is expected to rule on in the next few months. But Catholic lay people collected 2 million signatures defending the current ban.
Defending the ban
“I am against legalizing this horrendous crime,” said Jose Galat, rector of Bogota’s University of the Great Colombia and head of an anti-abortion group that assisted in the signature drive.
In addition to pushing his anti-abortion views on the university’s satellite television station, Galat bought a newspaper advertisement in the weekly El Espectador showing a dead fetus under the headline, “President Don’t legalize Abortion.”
But Colombian President Alvaro Uribe and other top leaders have remained largely silent, fearing their personal views on abortion could put them at odds with voters or spark a confrontation with church leaders.
Vice President Francisco Santos acknowledged in an interview that unsafe abortions are “a serious health problem” in Colombia. Yet he declined to take a public stand on Roa’s lawsuit.
“You’re going to get me involved. Please don’t do that,” Santos said. “It’s such a hot issue.”
Colombia is not the only Latin American country where the fight over abortion is making headlines.
Earlier this month, legislators in Brazil–the world’s largest Catholic country–shelved a bill to legalize abortion in the first trimester of pregnancy after opposition from Brazil’s National Conference of Bishops and leftist President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva.
Brazil forbids abortion except in cases of rape or severe danger to the life of the mother.
A similar bill easing abortion restrictions was narrowly defeated last year in the legislature in Uruguay, where abortion is legal only when the life or health of the expectant mother is endangered, in cases of rape or to preserve “family honor.”
About 3.7 million unsafe abortions are carried out each year in Latin America and the Caribbean, and an estimated 3,700 women in the region die annually from the practice, according to the World Health Organization.
Experts agree that most of those who die are poor women–often teenagers–who become pregnant because they lack access to contraceptives and other family planning methods and do not have $500 or more to pay for a safe abortion.
“Penalization has not reduced the number of unwanted pregnancies or the number of abortions,” said Lenis Urquijo, director general of public health at Colombia’s Ministry of Social Protection. “Penalization has increased the number of maternal deaths.”
Clinics openly advertise
Despite being outlawed, abortion is so common in Colombia that abortion clinics openly advertise their services in the gritty Colombian newspaper El Espacio.
“Pregnant? Late? Immediate Solution!” read one ad, followed by the clinic’s phone number and address. Several other clinics offered injections and pills, assuring readers their methods are “100% effective” in terminating a pregnancy.
Roa said the clinics charge about $45 for an abortion in the first month of pregnancy, and an additional $45 for each month after that. They offer drugs to induce an abortion in ways that can cause serious bleeding and other health problems.
“Nobody is monitoring the way they are providing medical services,” she said.
One Colombian who nearly died from an unsafe abortion is Maria Eugenia Murillo, 31, a mother of two who in 1999 became pregnant by a man who ended their brief relationship after learning of the pregnancy.
Earning only $2 a day as a waitress in Fresno, a town northwest of Bogota, Murillo said she couldn’t support a third child and feared losing her job if her boss discovered she was pregnant.
She said she went to a local pharmacy where she was given some pills and two injections, including one containing pitocin, a drug that induces labor in pregnant women.
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Later that day, Murillo–3 1/2 months pregnant–was on lunch break when she began bleeding. She delivered a male fetus in the restaurant’s bathroom, wrapped it in a towel and walked 10 minutes home.
Several hours later, still hemorrhaging and growing weaker, she was rushed to one hospital and then another.
“I thought I was going to die,” recalled Murillo, who was hospitalized for eight days. “The pain was horrible.”
Six years later, she remains filled with sadness at aborting her fetus and questions whether she made the right decision. Yet she supports legalizing abortion in limited cases.
“If my life is in danger or the fetus is deformed, I should have the opportunity to abort,” Murillo said.
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