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The Global Gag Rule and women’s lives lost
By Ana Campoy

In her fight to decriminalize abortion in Colombia, Monica Roa, a 29-year-old lawyer, faces a familiar challenge in a predominantly Catholic country: the church and the conservative right.

But she is also facing a less vocal adversary. Through a policy that denies international aid to any non-governmental organization that advocates for or provides abortion services abroad, the United States is indirectly shaping a debate that has sprouted in many Latin American countries, namely, whether women should have the right to end a pregnancy.

For Roa, who in December filed a lawsuit with Colombia’s Constitutional Court to legalize abortion in the case of rape, child malformation or when a woman’s life is in danger, this policy has meant that some of the players with the most at stake have traded their silence on the issue for U.S. funds. 

“It’s a very difficult decision,” she says. “In private many people have told me that they are totally in favor of [the lawsuit] and that they’re really upset they can’t support it, but otherwise they would lose funding for a program that may cover very important needs.”    

Abortion under any circumstance is banned in Colombia, Chile and El Salvador.  Rules are a bit more lax in other Latin American countries, such as Mexico. There, in most of the country, abortion is permitted in case of rape, when the woman’s life is in danger, and in one state, the Yucatan, for economic reasons.  However, legal and safe abortions remain elusive in most of Latin America, even when stipulated by law, researchers say.  

The U.S. policy alone will not determine the outcome of Roa’s suit, or defeat other attempts at legalizing abortion in the region. It will be up to be local governments to decide. However, by conditioning its aid, the U.S. impoverishes the public debate, a well-tried system of policy-making in the U.S., but one that is still in diapers in Latin America, opponents of the policy say. 

“Very useful information is lost,” says Roa. “There are organizations that are experts in reproductive health, whose position is very relevant, but we haven’t been able to count on that.”

This side effect of the U.S. anti-abortion policy has earned it the name of “Global Gag Rule” among its opponents. 

Officially, it is known as the Mexico City policy, and it was established by President Reagan in 1984 during the United Nations population conference in that city. President  Clinton removed it on his first day as president in 1993, but President George W. Bush reinstated when he started his first term in 2001.  

Its main goal is to prevent U.S. Agency for International Development funds from sponsoring non-governmental organizations that “perform abortions or actively promote abortion as a method of family planning,” according to the Bush administration.

Since abortion is illegal in virtually every Latin American country, the policy technically should not interfere with legal activities going on in the region.  However, this is not how it works on the ground, people who work closely with reproductive health NGOs in Latin America say. 

Marianne Mollmann, who spent several months in Peru talking to reproductive health NGOs about the effects of the Mexico City policy, says aid recipients are often confused about the restrictions imposed by it and tend to censor themselves.

“It’s quite complicated,” she says. “The implementation guide comes in English and there aren’t many people who can understand,” she says. “People think, ‘We better not do this’ without really knowing, when in fact there’s really a lot of things you can do.”

This includes advocating for abortion when it’s not meant as a family-planning method, or providing post-abortion care, which the Bush White House has openly allowed under the Mexico City policy.

However, with funds few and scattered, NGOs prefer not to take any risks, adds Mollmann, who is now a researcher for Human Rights Watch women’s rights division.

Although virtually every country in Latin America can be labeled as “developing,” the region’s economic progress in the past decades has deflected donors to needier areas, such as Africa. In 2004, Latin America received $4.9 billion, 25% more than the $3.9 billion it got in 1970.  Aid to Africa went up more than 200% in the same period, from $6.1 billion to $19.3 billion, according to data from the Center for Global Development, a Washington-based think tank that compiles international aid statistics. 

But while Latin America may not be the highest on the list, health statistics show the region remains in need. When it comes to unsafe abortions, for example, Latin America espouses a higher figure than Africa. In 2000, the latest year for which data is available, there were 39 unsafe abortions per 100 live births in South America, while in Africa there were 14, data from the World Health Organization shows.  

Unsafe abortions also account for a higher rate of all maternal deaths in South America, which has 19%, compared to 12% in Africa, according to WHO data.    

“The notion that women have to pay, even with their own lives, in order to avoid an abortion has created the feeling among women that their lives are worthless in the eyes of the government,” says Marta María Blandón, Nicaragua Country Director for Ipas, an North Carolina-based NGO that advocates for women’s sexual and reproductive rights. “This has hurt women’s self-esteem and generated a passionate reaction to defend their rights as citizens and people.”

Mexico City policy or not, Latin American women’s groups are pushing for the legalization of abortion. In Colombia, women have taken to the streets to protest the laws banning abortion; in Argentina, they organized a nationwide campaign for safe and legal abortions. And there are Pan-American efforts to decriminalize abortion, such as the one organized by the 28th of September Campaign, which set that date as the day for the right to abortion of women in Latin America and the Caribbean and involves women from 21 countries.

So far these women haven’t been able to overturn laws against abortion in any country, but they have been able to make a taboo subject surface into the national conversation.  In Colombia, Roa views the debate about abortion as more democratic and no longer dominated by the religious and moral arguments.

“No matter what happens with the court’s new decision,” she says, “we have already achieved a very important goal.”

Ana Campoy is a freelance journalist based in San Francisco’s Bay Area, although she has spent the past four months living and reporting in her native Mexico. She recently spent a week in Cartagena de Indias, Colombia, learning journalism from some of the best in the trade: Alma Guillermoprieto and 11 other accomplished Latinamerican journalists. 

Su Conexión

Challenging abortion law in Colombia, an interview with Monica Roa:
http://www.whrnet.org/docs/interview-roa-0507.html

“The Global Gag Rule from the Perspective of the Women’s Movement in Peru”:
http://www.crlp.org/hill_int_ggr_chavez_speech.html

Women’s Link Worldwide, working to advance women’s rights:
http://www.womenslinkworldwide.org/whoweare.html