Chilean President Michelle Bachelet. (Johan Ordonez/AFP/Getty)
[/dropcap]T[/dropcap]he presidents of Chile and the Dominican Republic both made moves in the past week to ease their countries’ laws banning abortion in all cases. If passed, both proposals will legalize the procedure in limited circumstances, however the majority of women throughout Latin America continue to face dire structural and legal obstacles to accessing reproductive healthcare.
Dominican Republic President Danilo Medina has officially recommended that legislators build exceptions into the country’s abortion ban for cases of rape, incest, fetal deformities and when the mother’s health is at risk. (It is expected to be developed into a bill next month.) Chilean President Michelle Bachelet’s proposal to override the ban in similar circumstances may be even narrower: fetal deformities constitute an exemption only in cases when the fetus is unlikely to survive.
Even these few exceptions are an advancement for the region. Latin America has some of the most notorious anti-abortion laws in the world. Besides Chile and the Dominican Republic, abortion is illegal in all cases in El Salvador, Nicaragua, Haiti, Suriname and Honduras. Only in Cuba, Uruguay and Mexico City are abortions “legal upon request,” or in all cases before 12 weeks. The region’s severe restrictions yields frightening results: the world’s highest rates of clandestine abortions take place in Latin America, which kill thousands of women each year. Other women face other serious repercussions as a result of the ban. In one high-profile case in 2012 in El Salvador, a woman was denied an abortion despite serious health risks and an unviable fetus, only to undergo a C-section at 27 weeks. The baby did not survive, and “Beatriz” faced serious long-term health affects as well as harassment by anti-choice activists.
But for the millions of Latin American women seeking abortion who don’t fall into the narrow categories in which the procedure is allowed, little progress has been made in the way of access. While the region’s anomalous anti-abortion laws have been widely ascribed to entrenched Catholic influence, the real reasons for such severe restrictions are slightly more nuanced.
While Catholicism has historically opposed abortion, the Church doesn’t have the institutional sway it once did. Despite being helmed by an Argentine pope, the Catholic Church has been steadily declining throughout Latin America — in the past 20 years, Catholic self-identification has reportedly fallen from 90% to 69%. But this drop has had a minimal effect on liberalized abortion laws. In fact, much of the diminished Catholic influence in the region is due to the growing Evangelical influence — and Latin American Protestants are more likely to support severe abortion restrictions, not less.
The Latin American political landscape is also a major reason for limited access: while abortion bans were being overturned throughout much of 20th century Catholic Europe, Latin America was facing instability and dictatorial regimes. Activism associated with abortion rights elsewhere was stamped out or diverted into other democratic goals.
Just as instability fueled modern restrictive abortion laws, the opposite seems true as well — meaning such laws tend to reinforce instability, thanks notably to their deleterious economic effects. The majority of countries with outright bans are among the region’s poorest, and many studies show that a lack of access to abortion services is a major cause of poverty. While a majority of Latin Americans still oppose abortion on moral grounds, it will be difficult to do so on economic ones.
