MEXICO CITY — The Inter-American Commission on Human Rights (IACHR) on Wednesday known as for international locations in the Americas to reinforce protections for ladies and women searching for abortions, after observing measures that “go backwards” final 12 months.
“Each materials and formal measures have been noticed that go backwards in the assure of reproductive rights freed from all types of violence and discrimination,” the IACHR mentioned in an announcement.
El Salvador “stood out,” it mentioned, for 30- and 50-year sentences for murder imposed on two girls final 12 months, regardless of rights activists saying they suffered miscarriages.
The small Central American nation, which has a few of the world’s harshest anti-abortion legal guidelines, bans all terminations even when the being pregnant poses a danger to the lady’s life or outcomes from rape or incest.
Even in international locations the place abortion is partially authorized, the IACHR mentioned women and youths who turned pregnant because of rape or incest confronted difficulties accessing healthcare.
In Brazil, Argentina, Colombia and Panama, medical and authorized professionals serving to present entry to abortions permitted below nationwide legal guidelines confronted threats of authorized motion, in response to the IACHR.
Whereas many U.S. states defend entry to abortion, the physique highlighted the overturning of the landmark Roe v. Wade ruling, which for near half a century established a constitutional proper to abortion.
The IACHR praised Colombia’s decriminalization of abortion by 24 weeks of gestation final February, in addition to strikes by Mexican states, together with southern Quintana Roo, to permit abortion inside a set variety of weeks.
