Podcast
44. Colombia: The strategy that decriminalized abortion
In the United States’ election next November, reproductive rights will effectively be on the ballot, thanks to the Supreme Court’s 2022 “Dobbs” decision that there is no constitutional right to abortion. But also in 2022, two thousand miles further south, Colombia’s Constitutional Court ruled in the opposite direction. Colombian feminists, buoyed by advances in Argentina in 2020 and Mexico in 2021, had mounted a huge campaign to get abortion completely removed from the penal code and regulated instead under Colombia’s health services. Although that goal wasn’t fully achieved, abortion was decriminalized up to 24 weeks – a huge victory for the reproductive rights movement. Catalina Martínez Coral, Vice–president in Latin America for the Center for Reproductive Rights, recalls the strategy that built the campaign and the arguments that prevailed.