Mexico City, August 7, 2023. Ipas, a network of local organizations working on three continents to ensure that all women and people with reproductive capacity can make reproductive choices, is celebrating 50 years of existence around the world. Throughout this time, its members have positioned a clear message in different territories: the criminalization of abortion affects everyone and that is why they will continue to work to ensure access to safe abortion as a health service and not as a crime.
At Ipas Latin America and the Caribbean, we know that the criminalization of abortion affects everyone because criminalizing the termination of pregnancy is not only one of the most harmful ways to instrumentalize and politicize the bodies and lives of women and people with the capacity to bear children, but it can have consequences for their families and entire populations if they die from a complication from an unsafe abortion or if they are imprisoned for having an abortion and cannot continue to provide income for their families or care for children and the elderly.
“The criminalization of abortion affects everyone because it imprisons women and people with gestational capacity for having an abortion, damaging their lives and harming entire families. In prohibitive countries, it is essential to accompany those who are criminalized for having an abortion, since they are subject to severe penalties by reclassifying abortion as another type of crime,” said Fernanda Diaz de Leon, Ipas Latin America and the Caribbean Advocacy deputy director.
In this sense, on our 50th anniversary we believe that abortion should be a public health issue. Countries that have improved their public policies, legalizing access to safe abortion procedures, have achieved important benefits in the public health of their population, such as the reduction of maternal mortality in general and by abortion, and of the morbidity and hospital burden due to obstetric emergencies and complications such as: hemorrhages, infections and traumatic injuries caused by unsafe procedures, which regularly occur under contexts of illegality.
“The criminalization of abortion can have harmful consequences for entire families and populations if a woman or person with the capacity to bear a child dies from a complication of an unsafe abortion. This can change with access to abortion through health services, self-management and escort networks,” said Mara Zaragoza, Ipas Latin America and Caribbean Strengthening deputy director.
On our 50th anniversary we reaffirm our commitment to our global mission, therefore we continue to work for decriminalization because Latin America presents a diverse and contrasting panorama of legal frameworks and political contexts of access to abortion, from five countries that prohibit it in its entirety regardless of the circumstances and punish it with heavy prison sentences (El Salvador, Honduras, Nicaragua, Dominican Republic and Suriname) to those that recognize it as a human right of women and people with gestational capacity guaranteed by the public health system, such as Argentina and Colombia.
Last year alone in Latin America, 38,576 people had abortions at Ipas-supported facilities and 30,263 people received contraceptive services at Ipas-supported facilities. Today, Ipas, as an international network of local organizations, works with partners in more than 30 countries in Africa, the Americas and Asia to ensure that all people have access to high-quality, safe abortion care.
The road to reach so many regions has been long and steady. In 1973, Ipas was founded alongside the creation of the manual vacuum aspiration (MVA) kit, one of two safe abortion technologies recognized by WHO. It began its local presence in countries in 1982, with the program to train safe abortion providers in Mexico; it also reached one of the most restrictive environments for abortion, Nicaragua, and from there expanded its work to the rest of Central America; it also reached countries in Asia, Africa and others in Latin America.
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