In recent years, nations throughout Central America, especially those with enduring relationships with various conservative movements in the United States, have seen the introduction of hyper-conservative laws that further criminalize abortion and reproductive rights. Abortion is constitutionally illegal in Guatemala, with an exception only in the case that a mother’s life is threatened by the pregancy. Anti-abortion laws in neighboring El Salvador, Honduras, and Nicaragua, are far more extreme.
The leaked opinion signaling the intent of U.S. Supreme Court conservatives to repeal Roe v. Wade has generated concern among advocates of abortion rights in the region who have struggled for years to obtain the most basic rights.
Simultaneously, several countries in Latin America have seen rapid advancements in the recognition of reproductive rights as abortion has been decriminalized in some parts of Mexico, partially permitted in Colombia, and legalized in Argentina.
The leaked opinion signaling the intent of U.S. Supreme Court conservatives to repeal Roe v. Wade has generated concern among advocates of women’s health and abortion rights in the region who have struggled for years to obtain the most basic rights.
“It is a bad message for the nations that are conditioned to [following] U.S. policies,” Ada Valenzuela, director of the National Union of Guatemalan Women, tells The Progressive. “It is a bad message about human rights. It [would be] a historical setback if this were to happen.”
Valenzuela says the nations of Latin America “are influenced by American politics and by those [in the United States] who finance conservative proposals [here].”
El Salvador’s anti-abortion law is among the most extreme; there, women found guilty of having an abortion or miscarriage can spend years in prison. In 2022, at least five women were freed after spending years in prison for having miscarriages. While this is a positive sign, the troubling laws remain on the books and people who have abortions still face harsh sentences. On May 9, Salvadoran authorities sentenced a woman to thirty years in prison for “killing her unborn child,” but advocates say she had an obstetric emergency.
But Guatemala has sought to catch up to these regressive laws, and even surpass them.
On March 8, conservatives in Guatemala approved a new law that would impose new limits on abortion, outlaw all forms of sexual education outside of the family, criminalize those who assist in an abortion, criminalize miscarriages, label members of the LGBTQ+ community “abnormal,” and prohibit the prosecution of anyone who carries out a hate crime against them.
“This law is a setback for the country in terms of human rights,” Myrna, a women’s health advocate from the largely Indigenous department of Sololá in the Guatemalan western highlands (who declined to give her last name out of fear of retribution), told The Progressive during a protest against the law in March 2022.
After a wave of such protests, Guatemala’s conservative president, Alejandro Giammattei, threatened to veto the law, which had been in the Guatemalan congress since at least 2017.
The law in Guatemala was an extreme advancement in far-right politics that have made strange bedfellows between far-right religious politicians and politicians directly tied to drug traffickers. And often these lines become blurred. This is especially clear in the rise of narco-evangelical pastors.
At least two other proposals currently before the Guatemalan congress would have a direct effect on the health of women and members of the LGBTQ+ community. One is an anti-trans law, known as the “Law on Gender,” which legally recognizes only two genders and seeks to “protect children'' from the influence of “gender disorders.” Another law further criminalizes the teaching of sexual education in schools.
Sex education is already limited in Guatemalan public schools, especially in rural areas.
“Access to sexual education is very far away,” Myrna says. “We have high rates of childhood maternity and many neighbors die during childbirth because they do not have access to education. There are no health services. We cannot leave the task of educating daughters to families because their families do not know.”
The lack of reproductive rights, coupled with the lack of education around sexual health and reproduction, has dire consequences for Guatemala.
In 2021, the nation had more than 2,000 reported pregnancies among children between ten and fourteen years old. Cases of childhood pregnancies, which are the result of rape, sometimes by family members, have been on the rise in recent years. Guatemala has the highest rate of childhood pregnancies in Latin America.
“We can assert that all cases of pregnancies in girls under fourteen are the result of sexual violence,” Valenzuela says. “[This is why] we talk about access to abortion as a right and as a possibility to stop sexual violence.”
According to Valenzuela, the National Institute of Forensic Sciences of Guatemala conducts examinations of at least twenty-five women involved in cases of sexual violence each day. But acts of sexual violence rarely result in charges against the perpetrators. Guatemala has also seen an increase in the of killings of women, including 234 murders so far this year, as of May 4.
In both the United States and in Guatemala, legislation is presented as “defending life” and justified with the language of liberty. But, as Valenzuela notes, the true goal is maintaining the patriarchy.
“There is no liberty,” Valenzuela says. “It seems that freedom is [only] within the framework of the market and not of the basic principles of human rights.”