Colombia Considers Constitutional Amendment to Ban Abortions From Conception

Barack Obama, one of America’s greatest promoters of abortion, once infamously said, “Elections have consequences.” How right he was.

And sometimes those consequences arrive quickly. Colombia’s newly elected conservative government has not even taken office and already members of the incoming governing coalition are supporting a constitutional amendment to protect human life from fertilization. Good.

But judging from the reaction, in a recent op-ed in Latin America’s largest digital newspaper, one might think they had proposed outlawing elections and that the end is nigh.

SUPPORT LIFENEWS! If you want to help fight abortion, please donate to LifeNews.com!

A ridiculously long and exhausting piece published last week by El País describes the protective measure as “a long-held goal of the hard right.” That is revealing.

Protecting a child from abortion is now considered the business of the “extreme right.” Permitting abortion for any reason well into the sixth month of pregnancy, on the other hand, is presented as a perfectly moderate expression of human rights. Good to know.

The abortion evangelists should try to remember how Colombia arrived here, and why the populace is so upset.

In 2022, the Colombian Congress did not vote to allow abortion for any reason through 24 weeks of pregnancy. The people did not approve it in a referendum. Candidates did not run on it, defend it in public debates, and win a mandate to enact it.

The Constitutional Court imposed it.

Five judges voted yes. Four voted no. With that one-vote margin, the Court created one of the most permissive abortion policies in the world. It was Colombia’s version of Roe v. Wade: a deeply divisive social policy written by judges and then handed to the public as a constitutional command.

At 24 weeks, a child has a human face. She has fingers and toes. She moves, stretches, and responds to sound. Her mother can feel her kicking. With modern neonatal care, some children born at this stage survive.

Colombia nevertheless permits abortion on request through this point, and yet abortion zealots masquerading as journalists describe the effort to protect these children as radical.

What’s worse, the law after 24 weeks is not nearly as restrictive as its defenders suggest, either. Abortions may still take place when the pregnancy threatens the woman’s life or health, when the unborn child has a condition considered incompatible with life, or when the pregnancy resulted from rape, incest, or certain nonconsensual reproductive procedures. The health exception includes both physical and mental health

Those exceptions contain no stated gestational cutoff. The word “health,” especially when it includes mental health, also leaves considerable room for interpretation. That does not mean every abortion after 24 weeks happens casually. It does mean the supposed limit is far less solid than abortion advocates would like the public to believe.

The Colombian Constitutional Court has since gone further. It has described abortion through 24 weeks as a right that may be exercised “freely,” without satisfying any of the grounds that previously governed legal abortion.

Freely. Through six months.

That is the policy now defended as reasonable, settled, and apparently too sacred for elected representatives to question.

Colombians themselves have shown far more common sense. Shortly after the 2022 ruling, Invamer, (a Colombian market research and public-opinion polling company) asked 1,504 Colombian adults whether they agreed that women should be allowed to abort through 24 weeks of pregnancy.

The answer was overwhelming: 83.2 percent disagreed. Only 15.4 percent agreed.

The poll used in-person household interviews across urban and rural Colombia and reported a margin of error of 2.53 percentage points.

Their poll questioned the actual policy. It did not ask whether women should go to prison. It did not ask about abortion in cases of rape or when a mother’s life is threatened. It asked Colombians whether abortion should be allowed through 24 weeks.

More than eight in ten said no.

Now that voters have elected leaders willing to revisit the issue, abortion advocates have suddenly discovered their concern for proper democratic boundaries.

Catalina Martínez of the Center for Reproductive Rights told El País that merely reopening the public discussion is “dangerous.” That is an extraordinary thing to say about a debate taking place inside an elected legislature. Dangerous is not the word that comes to mind when citizens ask their representatives to protect human life. Dangerous is what happens to an unborn child during an abortion.

Laura Pedraza of the Roundtable for Women’s Life and Health warns that pro-life arguments could influence healthcare workers and encourage them to create “barriers.”

What barriers? A doctor who is personally and morally opposed to abortion is labeled a barrier?  A Catholic-run hospital that refuses, or even a secular hospital that hesitates, becomes a barrier too.  And heaven forbid a private citizen claims unease at the practice; they are accused of spreading stigma.

The bottom line is that they want the abortion itself to be protected from criticism.

And this is how court-created abortion policies protect themselves. When judges impose them, we are told the issue is settled. When voters object, we are told that reopening the discussion threatens established rights. When legislators act, they are accused of extremism. All in a day.

Colombia now has an opportunity to begin its democratic correction.

The proposed amendment may pass, or it may fail. Eight debates stand between its introduction and final approval. But those debates will occur in public. Legislators will have to vote. Citizens will be able to judge them. The subject will no longer belong exclusively to judges and advocacy organizations.

That is not extremism. It is how representative government is supposed to work.

Elections have consequences. After four years of a court-imposed abortion policy that 83 percent of Colombians rejected, the country’s unborn children deserve to see some of those consequences, too.

LifeNews.com Note: Raimundo Rojas is the Outreach Director for the National Right to Life Committee. He is a former president of Florida Right to Life and has presented the pro-life message to millions in Spanish-language media outlets. He represents NRLC at the United Nations as an NGO. Rojas was born in Santiago de las Vegas, Havana, Cuba and he and his family escaped to the United States in 1968.