MSF is pushing for the country’s conservative government to repeal the ban on the morning-after pill so that rape survivors are not forced to risk an unsafe abortion
BOGOTA (Thomson Reuters Foundation) - As Aurelia walked to work early one morning in the Honduran capital Tegucigalpa recently, a driver holding a gun told her to get into his car.
“He said: ‘Climb in or we’ll shoot you.’ One of the men got in the back and I was made to sit in the front. They taped my hands and my mouth and told me not to scream or they would kill me,” Aurelia told doctors from the medical charity Doctors Without Borders (MSF) after being raped at gunpoint.
The doctors gave her treatment and counselling but, like many rape survivors in Honduras, she was then faced with an unwanted pregnancy – a hazardous plight in a country where abortion is banned, the morning-after pill has been banned since 2009, and a dangerous backstreet abortion is the only way out for some of the many rape victims.
“One of the consequences of the total ban on the emergency contraceptive pill in Honduras is that a rape victim could seek an illegal and unsafe abortion, which puts the life of the patient at risk,” Bertrand Rossier, head of MSF’s mission in Honduras, told Thomson Reuters Foundation in a telephone interview from the capital Tegucigalpa.
“… our staff have to face patients who are already suffering incidental violence, who are then faced with an unplanned pregnancy. This clearly has psychological consequences for the victim,” Rossier said. Honduras is the only country in Latin America where emergency contraception is criminalized, he said.
MSF is pushing for the country’s conservative government to repeal the ban on the morning-after pill so that rape survivors are not forced to risk an unsafe abortion.
“In March, a congressman proposed to change the law that bans the emergency contraceptive pill. For MSF, this is an opportunity we’re trying to use to make the consequences of the ban visible,” Rossier said.
Most victims of sexual violence in Honduras are children, and of the 2,832 rape investigations the public ministry carried out in 2013, most involved girls aged from 10 to 14, MSF said. This is probably the tip of the iceberg, as the fear of reprisal and stigma associated with rape means only a small proportion of sexual assaults are reported to the police, it added.
Worldwide, unsafe abortions kill an estimated 47,000 women a year, and deaths due to complications from unsafe abortions account for nearly 13 percent of all maternal deaths, the World Health Organisation says.
Honduras is one of seven Latin American countries that outlaws abortion without exception, and 95 percent of all abortions in the region are considered unsafe, according to the WHO.
NO PROTOCOL FOR RAPE SURVIVORS
Like much of Latin America, Honduras is predominantly Roman Catholic. The influential Catholic Church, along with evangelical groups and conservative lawmakers, say that abortion infringes the rights of an unborn child, which should be protected by law at all costs.
On top of the ban on abortion and the morning-after pill, rape survivors in Honduras receive poor medical care in a country where over-stretched public hospitals struggle to cope with the victims of drug gang violence in one of the world’s most dangerous countries.
“Honduras is one of the few countries in Latin America where there are no protocols and norms that define how victims of sexual violence should be treated and the care they should receive. For MSF, that’s an emergency,” said Rossier.
“We’re asking the government to protect victims … by putting in place national protocols for victims of sexual violence,” he said, adding that MSF is part of a health ministry committee working to develop national guidelines on the treatment of rape victims.
The MSF and the health ministry set up a priority healthcare service in 2011 in parts of Tegucigalpa that offers free counselling and emergency medical treatment which can prevent HIV infection if received within 72 hours of a sexual assault, as well as protection against other sexually transmitted infections.
But raising awareness of the high level of sexual violence against women in Honduras remains a key challenge, partly because of the high level of violence generally. The capital, Tegucigalpa, has one murder every 74 minutes, and Honduras has the world’s highest murder rate.
“Part of the problem is that sexual violence is an invisible problem in Honduras. And because there are no protocols on how to treat victims of sexual violence, there is no real data on the issue,” said Rossier.
“The high level of rape in Honduras is certainly related to the high level of violence in general. MSF in Honduras is also responding to the consequences of different kinds of violence, including providing victims of extortion and kidnapping with mental health support,” he said.
Our Standards: The Thomson Reuters Trust Principles.
