“We established that safe and legal abortions for everyone was our biggest cause and believed it to be a just cause - and that is how the Causa Justa Movement began.”

What was abortion like in Colombia before the partial decriminalization that took place in 2006?

Colombia was one of the few countries in the world where abortion was completely banned and considered a crime in any instance. The possibility of an exemption from punishment was if a person were raped. Then the judge could consider that in sentencing, but it would not free the person from criminal proceedings.

In the late 1990s, conversations and debates about abortion were mostly focused on cases filed to make abortion even more restrictive. In 1997, Magistrate Carlos Gaviria was one of the first to publicly express disagreement with the courts, explaining that he did not believe that abortion should be totally prohibited in Colombia. This is the first light we see that gives us the hope for people to begin seeing abortion differently. 

The Table for the Life and Health of Women was founded around that time. Could you tell us a little about those early days and what it was like to found a feminist organization in Latin America?

A very important study was done around that time by the University of Externado. It basically demolished the myth that women who abort are young and irresponsible, and showed that in Colombia women chose to abort regardless of economic or marital status or the number of children they had. In fact, abortion was a frequent practice in women who were already mothers of more than one child. In that context of total prohibition and this new data, some feminist friends and I sat down to think of what we could do to change the conversation and that is how The Table was born.

Professionals from different disciplines - lawyers, doctors, psychologists, and philosophers - started thinking of arguments that would break the silence around abortion. At that time, I was just starting my career, working as a doctor at Pro-Familia, a non-profit organization that promotes Sexual and Reproductive Rights in Colombia. I co-founded a feminist collective with other women and we tried to see where there was a little light of hope to work with, to illuminate that path to the legalization of abortion.

In those years, we dedicated ourselves fundamentally to building those arguments, but the margin of action was small until the lawsuit of unconstitutionality was filed, which decriminalized abortion in 3 circumstances for the first time, in 2006. The three circumstances were:

• When the pregnant person’s life is at risk because of the pregnancy

• When there was a serious malformation of the fetus which made its extrauterine life unfeasible

• In the case of rape, transfer of a fertilized ovum or artificial insemination without consent, or incest

That 2006 decision greatly redefined what we did at The Table, and we began to develop strategies that would allow us to move forward fifteen years later with the decision that was made in 2022.

Activists celebrating the one-year anniversary of the ruling to legalize abortion in Colombia.

What is The Just Cause Movement (Movimiento Causa Justa)?

When abortion was decriminalized in three circumstances in 2006, we did several things at The Table. 

We accompanied women facing barriers to safe and legal abortion through administrative and legal processes. This allowed us to understand the barriers that women faced, and to document them.

We trained professionals throughout Colombia on the three circumstances, which we called “causales” or “the grounds” and produced resources for judicial and health professionals who had to interpret the 2006 decision in practice. We had to help them understand that risk to health, one of the circumstances in which abortion was legal, did not refer only to death. It also applied to mental health and the effects of pregnancy on the pregnant person. 

In 2017, after doing this work for about 11 years,  we began to realize that the model of causales for legal abortions was exhausted. The majority of women were still aborting illegally, and only 10% of women managed to access a safe abortion within the health care system.

We knew that women were being persecuted for the crime of abortion. We knew that being in a rural town was not the same as being in a big city like Bogotá. With all that information, we realized that the grounds had done all they could do and we had to return to the original goal: legalizing abortion completely. Naturally, our next question was how do we do this?

We established that safe and legal abortions for everyone was our biggest cause and believed it to be a just cause - and that is how the Causa Justa Movement began. The work that we started in 2017 was born as an initiative of The Table. In 2020, it became a public movement that presented the lawsuit in court that eventually achieved the decriminalization of abortion up to 24 weeks. 

This movement is saying that what we have done to date are merely half measures, where only some people under certain circumstances are allowed to access safe abortions, and that a woman's word and experience continues to be subject to the opinion of others. There was no possibility that our decisions could be based on our own reasons and respected. Causa Justa began simply as an initiative of The Table for the Life and Health of Women, but became a movement because we invited many organizations and people to become part of the conversation. We invited others to put into practice the strategies that we had designed; this  included work in the media, in social networks, social mobilization, and pedagogical work with different audiences. The movement was suddenly made up of hundreds of organizations and millions of people around the country.

What was it like to maintain the documentation of what was being done at the national level when there were more than 100 organizations that were working together?

We summoned all the organizations that work on sexual and reproductive rights in the country to tell them that we wanted to remove of abortion from the criminal code completely. We argued that this change in the way we discuss abortion will see less stigma and people will be able to access services based on their own reasons. We wanted to transform public conversations around the subject because it was hard to imagine changing the criminal code without involving more people in that process and helping more people understand and amplify that message.

We built a text, a Just Cause of 90 Arguments, because we thought that a public conversation needed to include many different arguments in favor of abortion. Someone may care more about controlling their own body, while others may be more interested in understanding why criminalizing abortion violates the right to health care, and others would prefer to discuss that fewer women die if abortion is decriminalized.

We built all those arguments and devised a strategy, which included training for different audiences, media interviews, social media messaging, and collaboration with other organizations. We had to reach young people and people who were not very informed about the issue, which meant working with local media and attending youth programs. 

We also had a legal strategy since our goal was decriminalization. Depending on the circumstances, we could bring a bill before Congress or we could present a new claim of unconstitutionality in the court, which is what we ended up doing. 5 organizations- The Table, Womens Link, The Reproductive Rights Center, The Medical Group for the Right to Decide, and Catholics for the Right to Choose presented the case to the court. During the time the court took to discuss our claim of unconstitutionality–  we were on the networks, in the media, and offering training. Though the case was presented by five organizations, more than 100 other organizations supported it.

Just Cause’s strategy allowed my mom and I to talk about abortion for the first time, a conversation triggered by the testimony of a well-known actress supporting Causa Justa. Can you tell us more about your strategy to reach different audiences?

We did not want the conversation to stay between people who already knew about abortion or only among people who were only in favor of decriminalization.

We had a reggaeton song about Causa Justa that became incredibly popular in the younger generation, reaching more than 4 million people. We also made those videos that your mother saw with Colombian actresses that reached an older demographic. We used different messages, saying the women who abort in Colombia are young and old, with and without children, but not all of us are persecuted, not all of us die. This movement is so that more people can live. 

In Colombia and in many countries we are used to talking about abortion in a very binary way - you are either in favor of it or against it. This conversation is an invitation to know the reality of abortion. 

What was it like to find out you were one of Time's 100 Most Influential People earlier this year?

It was a massive surprise that was neither in my plans or on my horizon. It was an opportunity to recognize that the work we had done was very important for women here in Colombia but also had an inspiring effect in other places. It was symbolic of a promise that things can change and that there are ways to achieve this in other countries, even in the United States. Being able to serve as an inspiration to the North that is always so convinced that those of us in the South can only ever look up to them was also very emotional. 

This was an international publication that covered the importance of having the right to make choices about our own bodies and be our own advocates. This is a recognition for an entire movement that gave everything they had to make lives for women and people with uteruses safer.