Paraguay's Draconian Abortion Law Punishes Rape Survivors
January 5, 2022 4:22PM EST
Strict abortion prohibitions do not stop women and girls from having abortions; they just force them to have unsafe abortions, putting their lives and health at risk.
Tamara Taraciuk Broner
Acting Director, Americas Division
@TamaraTaraciuk
Santiago Menna
Research Assistant, Americas Division
In mid-November, a Paraguayan government hotline received a report of suspected sexual abuse against a 13-year-old Indigenous girl in a community near the border with Brazil. The case was assigned to Roselí Echeguren, a lawyer in a government office for the protection of children’s rights in Paraguay.
Echeguren told Human Rights Watch that community members had noticed that the girl had started to wear a girdle. Echeguren went to see the girl and took her to the hospital, where doctors confirmed that she was pregnant. The girl told her she had kept silent “out of fear.”
The authorities opened a criminal investigation into sexual abuse, and community leaders arranged for the girl to move out of her house. Several psychologists have since interviewed her. But Echeguren said that nobody had asked her a crucial question: whether she wants to continue the pregnancy. She said that’s because of Paraguay’s draconian abortion law.
In Paraguay, abortion is legal only to save the life of a pregnant person. Women and girls are forced to continue unwanted pregnancies even in cases of rape or incest, pregnancies that pose a serious—but not life-threatening—health risk, and pregnancies in which the fetus has no hope of surviving outside the womb. This is one of the most restrictive abortion laws in Latin America.
More:
https://www.hrw.org/news/2022/01/05/paraguays-draconian-abortion-law-punishes-rape-survivors
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