BOGOTA, Colombia (AP):
AN ANONYMOUS caller accused her of genocide. Her home was broken into. Bodyguards now escort her around town.
Lawyer Monica Roa has felt the fury of anti-abortion advocates in this deeply Catholic country since she challenged Colombia's abortion laws in the nation's highest court. The lawsuit seeks to permit abortion only in extreme cases such as rape, but one leading opponent equated performing any abortion with the massacres committed during Colombia's ongoing war.
"How can we denounce crimes carried out by the illegal armed groups if we make it legal for a mother to murder her unborn child," Jose Galat, rector of the Roman Catholic Great Colombia University, told The Associated Press. "We lose all legitimacy."
Anti-abortion groups last month submitted to the Constitutional Court a petition with 2 million signatures urging magistrates to maintain existing abortion laws, Galat said during a telephone interview Monday.
The court will issue a verdict in the case within two months, a court spokeswoman said.
Colombia, Chile and El Salvador are the only Latin American countries that currently prohibit abortion in all circumstances. An estimated 300,000 pregnancies are terminated by illegal abortions in Colombia every year, and 30 per cent of women who have the abortions suffer complications, according to Social Welfare Ministry figures.
"The ban poses a major health risk to women," Roa, a lawyer with Madrid-based rights group Women's Link, told the AP on Monday. "But for a long time, nobody dared take on the issue."
Roa filed the challenge against the ban in April based on international human rights agreements that recommend abortion be decriminalised in cases in which a woman was raped, if her life is at risk or if the foetus has deformations "incompatible with life outside the womb." Roa's challenge calls for abortion to be legalised in Colombia in those cases.
A 2003 survey by the abortion rights group Catholics for the Right to Decide found that most Colombians support the changes proposed by Roa.
Although Roa favours legalising abortion completely, she said she limited the request only to extreme cases in order to increase the chances of a favourable ruling.
"I didn't want to scare away the judges," she said.
Roa has since been harassed by anti-abortion militants, prompting the government to provide her with an armed escort.
"We started getting phone calls threatening us, telling us that we won't get away with it," Roa said. "In June, some people broke into my apartment and stole my computer and all my files but didn't touch anything else, so all they wanted was information."
She said Women's Link also moved its offices in Bogota for security reasons.
"They are just so radical," she said of the militants. "I guess it's because they know we can win."
