By Irene Escudero |
Bogotá (EFE) They wanted to hospitalize María until an interdisciplinary committee decided if she could do it.
Idaluz and María, whose names have been changed for privacy reasons, are some of the cases that La Mesa por la Vida y la Salud de las Mujeres has compiled since the Constitutional Court ruled in favor of abortion a year ago and which exemplifies the reluctance of some doctors to respect the decisions of women and the barriers that persist to access a right.
In conflict zones, mainly rural, where armed groups impose their law and access to health is violated by lockdowns, where treating a baby’s diarrhea is a chimera, abortion seems fiction.
rural problem
“I think that in the villages they don’t know that they have the right to an abortion,” says Corine Peter, health coordinator in the Doctors Without Borders (MSF) projects, who was behind the lawsuit before the Constitutional Court, in the department of Nariño ( southwest).
In these areas of the Pacific that are difficult to access and where there is no hospital for kilometers away, beliefs, religions and community pressure also play a role: “We are talking about very small villages where everything is known,” explains the doctor.
Peter accompanied a woman at 18 weeks to a health post where she was looked at with reluctance and even knowing that they could not perform the abortion because it was too far advanced, she was judged and harassed.
When they sent her to Tumaco, the main urban center on the coast, the situation repeated itself: psychologists and doctors giving their opinion and forgetting “that the woman was not a girl” and that she had made a conscious decision.
In Pasto, the regional capital and the only one where they perform abortions in the entire department after 12 weeks of gestation, she succeeded, but she admits that without the support of MSF she would not have succeeded.
small steps
From MSF, which has abortion among its services, they assure that “word of mouth” is beginning to work and women sometimes go to them and not to health posts because they know that they can guarantee their privacy and secrecy.
It is not ideal, since no one should hide to have an abortion, but Peter points out: “we would like it to be normalized because the right exists.”
In places plagued by conflict and state neglect, where society is deeply patriarchal and some midwives even charge more depending on the sex of the baby, there are steps forward.
It can be seen in the mother who arrived with her 11-year-old daughter at a mobile clinic asking for planning methods for the little girl. “I don’t want her to have the same life as me,” she told the doctors.
But the distance is still great and with a thousand obstacles. When a woman asks for an abortion, the hospital manager calls MSF to see if they have the medicines because many times they don’t.
“It’s just that it’s really cheap (…) When people think of an interruption they are imagining an operating room with sterile people and no, it’s a cheap and easy kit,” says Peter.
The head of MSF in Colombia and Panama, Luis Eguiluz, reinforces the idea: “We do not support abortion as a family planning measure but above all because it saves lives.”
Conscientious objection to abortion
What happens when a woman travels for hours, hidden from her community, to have an abortion and can’t find a doctor who wants to perform it because everyone clings to the objection?
“Both are rights, but one affects life and the other morale,” laments Eguiluz.
It is a right but some centers, especially private ones of a religious nature, continue to object institutionally, which is prohibited, and that also works as group pressure.
Doctors do not want to be listed as “the one who performs abortions”, to be accused of criminals, so they cling to conscientious objection and the system charges abortions to gynecologists who do perform them, which produces overloads of everything guy.
To overcome these barriers, information is vital, sexual education a value, and the normalization of abortion as one more medical service to which every woman is entitled is fundamental.
“You don’t have to fall asleep, you have to make sure that it normalizes. You have to understand that it is a woman’s right and accept it as a society,” argues Eguiluz, looking at the US as an example that “rights can be reversed.”
