IN THE staunchly Roman Catholic town of Pamplona in Colombia, two young women did what many here consider unthinkable: pregnant and scared, they took a cheap ulcer medication known to induce abortions. When the drug left them bleeding, they were treated at a local emergency room - then promptly arrested.
Insisting that abortion was rare, Pamplona's conservative leaders thought the case was over. Instead, the episode, in April, reverberated throughout Colombia and helped galvanise a national movement to roll back laws that make abortion illegal, even
to save a mother's life.
Latin America holds some of the world's most stringent abortion laws, yet it still has the developing world's highest rate of abortions - a rate that is far higher even than in Western Europe, where abortion is widely and legally available.
Increasingly, however, women's rights groups are mounting challenges in courts and on the streets to liberalise laws that in some countries ban abortion under any circumstances. So far, no country has dropped its ban. But the effort, spurred by the high mortality rate among Latin American women who undergo clandestine abortions, has begun to loosen once ironclad restrictions and opened the door to change.
Although it may seem small, it is a seismic shift for a region where abortion is readily available only in Cuba and a few other Caribbean nations.
"There is a real trend for change, particularly in South America," said Marianne Mollman, a researcher for Human Rights Watch, which supports efforts to decriminalise abortion in Latin America. "I think it's the end of the realisation that the criminalisation of abortion doesn't lead to less abortion, but that it leads to a lot of preventable problems."
In Brazil, the world's largest Roman Catholic country, women's groups successfully pushed for new regulations this year that permit a rape victim to get an abortion without providing a police report to doctors, as was required. The government of President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva also formed a commission this year that called for legalising abortion up to the third month of pregnancy. Congress is debating the plan.
In Uruguay, the senate came three votes shy last year from legalising abortion, setting the stage for future efforts by abortion rights advocates, while Argentina's congress is debating about a half dozen bills to legalise abortion in some instances.
Women's rights groups from New York to Buenos Aires are also watching closely the outcome of a lawsuit filed by a Colombian lawyer, Mónica Roa, with the nation's highest court. It seeks to legalise abortion when a mother's life is in danger, when the foetus is expected to die of abnormalities or when the pregnancy resulted from rape.
The central argument in the case - one that could set precedent - is that Colombia's anti-abortion laws violate its international treaty obligations, which require the nation to ensure a woman's right to life and health.
The abortion rights movement in Latin American has come as women throughout the region are having fewer children and benefiting from once improbable opportunities in the workplace and politics.
Regional health officials increasingly argue that tough laws have done little to slow abortions. The rate of abortions in Latin America is 37 per 1,000 women of childbearing age, the highest outside eastern Europe, according to United Nations figures. Four million abortions, most of them illegal, take place in Latin America annually, the UN reports, and up to 5,000 women are believed to die each year from complications from abortions.
In an interview, a doctor in Medellín, Colombia, said that while he offered safe, if secret, abortions, many abortionists did not. "In this profession, we see all kinds of things, like people using witchcraft, to whatever pills they can get their hands on," said the doctor, who charges about $45 to carry out abortions in women's homes.
"They open themselves up to incredible risks, from losing their reproductive systems or, through complications, their lives," the doctor said.
Such arguments have done little to sway an anti-abortion movement that is largely led by influential leaders of the Roman Catholic Church.
In Colombia, José Galat, the Catholic rector of the Gran Colombia University, has collected two million signatures against efforts to legalise abortion and has paid for newspaper advertisements criticising abortion rights advocates. "If there is life, then it has all the rights and a mother cannot apply the death penalty," he said.
The full article contains 770 words and appears in Scotland On Sunday newspaper.
