Cuban police want to force a political prisoner to have an abortion

Is abortion a choice or a political issue in Cuba? The current Cuban Penal Code assumes it as a crime when it is carried out without the consent of the mother

CARLA GLORIA COLOMÉ
FEB 20, 2024

Lisdany Rodríguez is not going to have an abortion. It is the decision she made from her cell at the Guajamal women’s prison, and that her husband supports from his detention at the El Yabú men’s prison. If everything goes well, and the Cuban political police do not make Lisdany abort the fetus, in nine months a baby will be born who will not live with its parents. They will be serving their sentences for demonstrating against the government.

When the police took Lisdany into custody after the protests on July 11, 2021, her partner, Luis Ernesto Jiménez, had been in prison for a few months for running a black market business. A few days after their last conjugal visit, Lisdany felt a little discomfort in her body and stopped having her period. The first pregnancy test was positive. An ultrasound test confirmed that she was seven weeks and five days pregnant.

Continued: https://english.elpais.com/international/2024-02-20/cuban-police-want-to-force-a-political-prisoner-to-have-an-abortion.html

Mexico – What Comes After Decriminalizing Abortion?

Mexico’s supreme court handed down a victory for reproductive health care. Translating it into increased access is a different story.

BY MYRIAM VIDAL VALERO
OCT 10, 2023

In 2019, Aurelia García Cruceño, an 18-year-old Indigenous woman living in Guerrero, Mexico, had a miscarriage. The bleeding was so intense, according to news reports, that she lost consciousness. When she woke up in a hospital bed, she noticed that her hands and feet were handcuffed. The Guerrero Prosecutor’s Office detained her for allegedly having ended her baby’s life. She hadn’t known she was pregnant.

Aurelia’s case is tragic, and it isn’t an anomaly. It demonstrates a series of interconnected failures between Mexico’s health and legal systems, which too often accept gender violence as the status quo. Time and again, these systems restrict women’s access to reproductive health care and education—and then punish them for the consequences of their lack of access, or for trying to seek it.

Continued: https://slate.com/technology/2023/10/abortion-decriminalization-mexico-challenges.html

In Hospitals Across Africa, A Lack Of Post-Abortion Care

March 9, 2021
PATRICK ADAMS

Some of Onikepe Owolabi's most vivid memories of medical school in her native Nigeria are of the teenage girls she saw in the emergency room of a rural hospital with complications from an unsafe abortion — painful infections that, if left untreated, can lead to permanent disability or even death.

Each time, Owolabi, now a senior research scientist with the Guttmacher Institute, a nonprofit reproductive rights organization in the U.S. that supports abortion rights, assisted doctors in promptly providing the girls with a group of essential obstetric services known collectively as "post-abortion care," or PAC.

Continued: https://www.npr.org/sections/goatsandsoda/2021/03/09/936206516/in-hospitals-across-africa-a-lack-of-post-abortion-care

Argentina must legalize abortion so doctors like me don’t have to choose between helping or going to prison

Opinion by Cecilia Ousset
Dec. 28, 2020

I am a Catholic doctor, mother of four and a
conscientious objector to abortion who has been trying to reconcile her
religious views with public health needs. Because the reality that I see every
day is that all women have abortions. The married woman and the single one, the
Catholic, the Jewish, the atheist. Women who do not use birth control and those
whose birth control has failed them. Illiterate women and those with college
degrees.

The difference, however, is in the conditions under which they have abortions.
That’s always defined by their economic status.

Continued: https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2020/12/28/argentina-legal-abortion-senate-vote/

Mistreated pregnant women deserve more than your outrage

A meaningful response to obstetric violence requires political will from policy-makers and accountability for government failures.

Khatondi Soita Wepukhulu
16 October 2020

Global leaders must act urgently to ensure that safety and dignity in pregnancy and childbirth become automatic, integral parts of the maternal health care experience of all women.

On 18 September 2020, a harrowing video appeared on Twitter. It showed a woman, Jackline Faustina, giving birth on the road outside Nairobi’s Pumwani maternity hospital. The woman, it was said and later confirmed by city authorities, had been denied entry into the hospital. It was the second day of a ‘go-slow’ industrial action by hospital staff.

Continued: https://www.opendemocracy.net/en/5050/mistreated-pregnant-women-deserve-more-your-outrage/

An Irish woman in Argentina: Now, both my countries have voted for abortion

An Irish woman in Argentina: Now, both my countries have voted for abortion
The decriminalisation of abortion in Argentina has been brought within striking distance

June 18, 2018
Sophie Parker in Buenos Aires

As Ireland took to the polls on May 25th, Argentina was celebrating May Revolution Day, commemorating the first successful revolution in South America’s Independence process. As I followed events across the ocean from my adopted home in Buenos Aires, I couldn’t help but think of Ireland’s Eighth Amendment referendum in terms of revolution: not exactly a “quiet” one, to use the Taoiseach’s word, but as part of a worldwide uprising that is increasingly difficult to drown out.

By the time the Eighth Amendment was repealed in Ireland, the debate in Argentina’s Congress on the decriminalisation of abortion was well under way. On June 14th, just before 10am, the streets around the Congress building erupted with roars of jubilation and relief as the nail-bitingly close result was revealed: the bill, first presented over a decade ago by the National Campaign for the Right to Legal, Safe and Free Abortion alliance, had passed.

Continued: https://www.irishtimes.com/life-and-style/abroad/an-irish-woman-in-argentina-now-both-my-countries-have-voted-for-abortion-1.3534574