Women’s Rights and Abortion in International Conferences and Documents

Since the 1990s, major legislative changes have been made in many countries, including some in Latin America, to recognize some women’s rights. However, as we shall see below, few are related to abortion. The changes made to acknowledge women’s rights were supported by the three international conferences held during the 1990s and their follow-up meetings held five to ten years later. These meetings were the World Human Rights Conference, organized in Vienna, Austria in 1993, the World Population and Development Conference, which took place in Cairo, Egypt in 1994 and the World Conference on Women, held in Beijing, China in 1995. During the same decade, several countries adopted the Inter-American Convention to Prevent, Sanction and Eradicate Violence against Women, drawn up in 1994, and the Statute of the International Criminal Court in 1998.  Many also supported the implementation protocol laid down in the Convention for the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination against Women (CEDAW) in 1999.

These international events were preceded by other world conferences on population and women where the legal equality between men and women and the rights of couples and individuals to freely decide on the number and spacing of their children were recognized. The first time these rights were acknowledged was at the First World Conference on Human Rights, held in Teheran in 1968 and later at the Population Conference held in Bucharest in 1974. At this latter conference, the need for the state to guarantee the exercise of these rights was established. Women’s physical integrity and their right to make decisions concerning their bodies, including optional motherhood, were added at the World Conference during the International Women’s Year held in Mexico in 1975. These changes related to women’s rights were based on documentation and the results of international and regional meetings (see Table1).

During the 1990s, the Cairo and Beijing conferences established that health and sexual and reproductive rights, particularly those of women, are fundamental for the exercise of human rights and development. Additionally, the international community recognized the importance of addressing the subject of unsafe abortions and the serious public health risk they represent for women’s lives. The international community recommended that prompt, humanitarian attention be given to women after an unsafe abortion. The Cairo Action Program and the Beijing Action Platform urged that “all governments and inter-governmental and non-governmental organizations increase their commitment to women’s health and take up the issue of the consequences of abortions carried out in inadequate conditions and recognize that they are an important public health problem (United Nations, 1994). All women should have access to high quality services to treat complications derived from having an abortion” (Action Program CIPD, §8.25 and Action Platform from Beijing §106, (b) and (k), in CRLP, 1999). At the same time the Beijing conference recommended that governments revise the laws that punish women that have had illegal abortions (§106 - k).

Sexual and reproductive rights have therefore received greater recognition due to the fulfillment of international human rights treaties and commitments made at these international conferences. Compliance with these commitments has driven the majority of the changes in the region as well as the design of policy and programs related to population and particularly reproduction. However, legislation on abortion and abortion services has not progressed in the same way in Latin America. Some of the reasons for this are the following:

• Insufficient and limited perspectives on abortion as a social problem. Abortion is generally seen as a public health problem by the above-mentioned conferences, rather than as a women’s right. Abortion is not seen as a contraceptive method for controlling the number and spacing of children or even as a last resort to limit the number of children in particular circumstances, such as contraceptive failure or the deficient quality of family planning services that is common in some countries and among some sectors of the population. Also, the recommendations made by the conferences to improve women’s reproductive health are limited to the provision of safe abortion services where, according to the legal status, they are permitted. They do not explicitly recognize, as stipulated by the Expert Committee for the follow-up of the fulfillment of the agreements reached at the Convention for the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women (CEDAW), that restrictive legislation that punishes women who have abortions and sanctions medical intervention discriminates against women and limits their freedom to make decisions about their own bodies. Therefore, these legislations constitute an obstacle to improving reproductive health conditions.
• The strong patriarchal culture characteristic of Latin America permeates the legislation of the majority of the region’s countries. This is closely related to the predominance of the Catholic religion and the persistence, even today, of Spanish- or Portuguese-influenced legislation imposed on the region during the Conquest, based on Roman Law and the Napoleonic Code. Thus, it is hardly surprising that the legislation that governs abortion in Latin America is characterized by a specific vision of a woman as a person who has to be protected legally or morally by the “paterfamilias” and whose honor is considered fundamental for the family. These attitudes are reflected in the implementation of legislation where lesser sentences are imposed on women who have undergone an abortion if the motive was to save her honor and good name. The situation is different in Caribbean countries with a British colonial tradition, as they are ruled by “common law” where principals and rules are based only on use and customs. The main difference between the two types of law is found in the role of the courts. Under common law, legal decisions create legal norms, whereas the Roman legal system has as its main source of law the written legislation (Center for Reproductive Law and Policy and DEMUS, 1997).

The fact that legislation on abortion has not been modified in line with the legal recognition of other reproductive rights is a cause of tension and conflict in the debates surrounding the issue. Among the points made is the lack of congruence of the restrictive legislation in the context of the human rights commitments made by countries that signed human rights agreements and the lack of compliance with the action plans that were agreed upon at the international conferences (Table 1) (Center for Reproductive Law and Policy, 2001).

Finally, it is worth mentioning the importance of the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) that were adopted by the General Assembly of the United Nations in September 2000. In them reproductive rights are hardly mentioned and appear in Goal 5 under the heading “Improving Maternal Health” through the following indicators: reducing maternal mortality, increasing the number of births attended by specialized sanitary personnel, and increasing the rate of contraception use.  Although one can assume that a reduction of maternal mortality among women who have abortions in unsafe conditions is part of maternal health improvements, there are no specific indicators in the MDG documents mentioning the topic of reproductive rights (Machinea et al,. 2005). However, some writers such as Marge Berer (2004) indicate that if 13% of all maternal deaths are due to abortion-related complications safe abortions are crucial to the fulfillment of the MDG. Notwithstanding this ambiguity, a report prepared by an independent advisory group to the Millennium Development Project commissioned by the General Secretary of the United Nations to develop strategies for the fulfillment of the Objectives, recognizes that sexual and reproductive health are key elements to achieving global well-being and poverty reduction (SIECUS, 2005).

^ Top of page