Report finds women and healthcare providers suffer discrimination and inhumane and degrading treatment in countries where abortion is criminalised
KUALA LUMPUR (Thomson Reuters Foundation):- Criminalising abortion does not stop the practice but instead forces women to obtain illegal and unsafe abortions and violates their human rights, especially those from poor, marginalised backgrounds, according to a report launched Tuesday.
In Bolivia, Brazil and Argentina, women who sought or had abortions were handcuffed to hospital beds and placed under police custody as they recovered while doctors and nurses were subjected to police raids and investigations, said the report by Ipas, a US-based global NGO dedicated to protecting women's reproductive health.
The victims are usually the most vulnerable women in society, said Beatriz Galli, a lawyer and Ipas’ Latin America policy associate.
“Our findings reveal that criminal justice systems mostly capture poor, young, uneducated, black and indigenous women living in poor, urban or rural areas,” she told journalists during the release of the report on the opening day of Women Deliver, the largest global conference focusing on the health and well-being of women and girls, running from May 28 to 30 in the Malaysian capital.
“They’re less able to access proper legal defence and have to wait for months or even years, for their cases to be resolved,” Galli added.
Hundreds of women and healthcare providers continue to suffer under restrictive laws and they are often stripped of their rights to due process and judicial guarantees and protections, said the report, which calls for abolishing such laws.
Such punitive power of the state “harms women’s reproductive autonomy, puts them at risk of arrest and imprisonment, and forces healthcare providers to make unethical decisions about their patients”, it added.
A NEW PHENOMENON
Take the case of a 28-year-old rape victim from Bolivia who became pregnant. She attempted to induce an abortion but ended up in the hospital with severe complications, said Ipas. Her doctor reported her to the police and she spent her 10-day hospital stay under police custody. She was then transferred to a prison for eight months.
In Brazil, a woman who went to the hospital after an unsafe abortion was handcuffed to her hospital bed for three months because she did not have money to make bail.
Leila Hessini, director of community access and youth at Ipas, said laws that criminalise abortion are a relatively new phenomenon.
“If we look back to the 19th century, there were actually no abortion laws,” she said.
“Punitive laws were later enacted in 1880s in Western European countries and regrettably these same punitive laws set the standard for many countries that were colonised” and women are now paying the price for these antiquated laws, she added.
Such laws are not limited to developing countries, however. They also are proliferating in established economies such as the United States, where a record number of proposals to curb abortion rights were made in state legislatures in 2011.
Hessini, who said anti-abortion laws “do not belong to the 21st century”, acknowledged that changing laws are just the start.
“Around women’s reproductive rights, there often is movement forward and we have to make sure there’s no movement backwards and that’s what’s happening in the U.S.,” she said. “It’s troubling and concerning.”
LEARNING FROM NEPAL
In the 1980s and 90s, Nepal was in a similar state to the three South American countries mentioned in the report.
Around a fifth of the women in prison during that time were incarcerated due to abortion, including a 16-year-old rape victim who unknowingly took a drug that caused abortion and then was sentenced to 12 years in jail, said Arzu Rana Deuba, a former member of parliament in Nepal and founder and president of Safe Motherhood Network.
In 2002, a new law decriminalisng abortion came into effect and abortion services became available in 2004.
“Now we have 1,500 trained workers all over Nepal and 500,000 women have accessed safe abortion care,” said Deuba.
“As a consequence our maternal mortality rate has reduced by almost half,” she added.
The fight is not yet over, however.
Deuba said there are concerns a new constitution will curb women’s rights in Nepal, noting that anti-abortion billboards have been popping up around the country.
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