The United Nations Human Rights Committee issued a ruling last month with the potential to expand reproductive rights in Ecuador and Nicaragua. Although it’s unclear how each country will implement the UN mandates handed down, the ruling is a step forward for a growing reproductive rights movement working to decriminalize abortion in Latin America.
In 2016, Planned Parenthood Global, Amnesty International, and other Latin American activism groups came together to form the “Son Niñas, No Madres” (Girls, Not Mothers) movement. They have filed legal cases before the UN Human Rights Committee against Ecuador and Nicaragua, representative of a regional pattern of girls forced to become mothers due to sexual violence and a lack of access to reproductive health services like abortion in 2019.
The ruling issued last month found the countries in this case responsible for violating the human rights of three girls who became mothers after being raped and were denied access to an abortion. As a part of the ruling, the UN committee mandated that these countries amend legislation to ensure access to abortion, especially in cases involving sexual violence and other health risks. It also said the countries must implement reparation measures to the girls involved in the cases. Both countries are expected to report back on their progress within six months.
“These rulings are a global victory for the feminist fight for reproductive autonomy, in this case, on behalf of girls who are survivors of sexual violence,” said Catalina Martínez Coral, the regional vice president for Latin America at the Center for Reproductive Rights, which is one of the co-litigating organizations within the movement, in a statement. “When forced to become mothers, these girls are not only re-victimized, but their health and life plans are also put at risk. Abortion is an essential health care service and must be guaranteed as such.”
Over the past decade, the “Marea Verde” (Green Wave) movement in South America has advocated for abortions to be legalized up to 14 weeks of pregnancy in Argentina, Mexico and Colombia. In Ecuador, the National Just Freedom movement has pushed for similar reform by bringing a case to the constitutional court to decriminalize abortion.
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Ecuador has some exceptions to its criminalization of abortion, but in practice, it is extremely difficult for women, especially from marginalized communities, to have access to an abortion there, said Dr. Alicia Yamin, director of the Global Health and Rights Project at the Petrie-Flom Center for Health Law Policy, Biotechnology and Bioethics at Harvard Law School.
International rulings like the one issued last month by the UN can bolster these movements on the ground to push for reform, and may embolden other organizations to take similar cases to international committees like this. However, it is not very likely that a ruling like this will have enough staying power to make significant change at the constitutional level on its own, said Dr. Camilla Reutersward, who studies abortion politics in Latin America in the Department of Government at Uppsala University in Sweden.
"These rulings are a global victory for the feminist fight for reproductive autonomy."
“We need to be very cautious in interpreting this as something that will translate into changes in domestic law,” Reutersward told Salon in a phone interview. “Though, of course, this type of ruling does set a precedent.”
Sometimes, several of these rulings can pile up before change is enacted. In 2002, for example, the UN Human Rights Committee issued a ruling against Peru mandating legislative changes that ensured women have access to safe and legal abortions. A similar case involving a woman who was the victim of rape came before the UN Committee on the Elimination of Discrimination in 2009, and the committee also ruled that Peru should amend its law to allow women access to abortion in cases of sexual violence. In 2023, a third case was filed to the UN Committee on the Rights of the Child by the Son Niñas No Madres movement.
“When there are coordinated rulings from several human rights bodies in some parts of the world, particularly Latin America, it tends to have what I would call an ecological influence,” said Alison Brysk, a human rights scholar at the University of California, Santa Barbara. “There is no direct authority relationship, but when the findings pile up from several different levels, they trickle down through Latin American legal institutions and open up space for domestic reform.”
Peru did change its laws to allow for therapeutic abortions, in which a pregnancy involves serious health risks, but access on the ground remains restricted, just like in Ecuador.
“That took years and years to develop that therapeutic abortion protocol in Peru, which excludes pregnancy as a result of rape, and is for life and serious threats to the health of the woman,” Yasmin said.
In Nicaragua, abortion remains fully illegal. There is little data reported from Nicaragua on how many women have been affected by this ban, although in El Salvador, where women can also be charged with aggravated homicide for seeking an abortion, at least 180 women have been prosecuted. Many more have faced serious health consequences.
“Nicaragua has basically eviscerated the rule of law and separation of powers and I think changes in legislation are going to be very unlikely,” Yasmin said. “I think this group will likely bring some other report back and there might be more dialogue and some more pressure … But it’s going to be an uphill battle.”
Nicaragua is one of four countries that has rolled back abortion rights since 1994, along with El Salvador, Poland and the United States. Across the world, nearly 60 countries have improved abortion access since then, although some of those changes have been incremental.
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“About half or more of the countries in the world are liberalizing reproductive rights, but we have some major examples of backlash, regression and stagnation in reproductive rights,” said Brysk, who has published a book about this backlash.
These movements working to increase abortion access in Latin American countries could influence reproductive rights movements across the world, including in the U.S. As this ruling in Ecuador and Nicaragua recognized, forced motherhood infringes upon a woman’s right to a dignified life, and perpetuates gender stereotypes and intersectional discrimination.
“When abortion rights are on the line, democracy is on the line, and the best way to defend abortion rights is to defend democracy,” Brysk said. “That’s true throughout the world and throughout the Americas.”
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