28S: Latin American women who launched the International Day for the Right to Abortion | The historic feminist meeting in San Bernardo in 1990

Thousands of feminist women gathered in Argentina’s small resort town of San Bernardo three decades ago and kicked off what would later become the Global Day of Action for Access to Legal and Safe Abortion, which is commemorated every September 28.

But there was also another very relevant fact, which is less well known was crucial to reduce the high rates of female mortality due to abortion. There, they also met, listening to Brazilian activists, the misoprostol, a medicine to treat gastric ulcers, which was also effective and safe in terminating pregnancies (and which, in countries where it is now authorized, is usually given in combination with mifepristone).

“It was like something amazing”, underlines the Chilean surgeon Marisa Matamala, 81, about this discovery which spread informally from Brazil among women, until the drug began to be used worldwide in pharmacological (non-surgical) abortions.

“It was like a catharsis of arguments. There was consensus. There were many Latin American leaders, women from many regions. It filled us with energy, ”adds Matamala of the meeting in San Bernardo, 360 kilometers south of the Argentine capital.

She was one of the women from across the region who attended the V Feminist meeting of Latin America and the Caribbean (Eflac), and that they were consulted on its meaning and heritage.

Over 3000 women attended the meeting, which included a abortion workshop with some 200 feminists from Argentina, Brazil, Colombia, Chile, El Salvador, Guatemala, Mexico, Nicaragua, Paraguay, Peru, Uruguay but also the United States, Canada and From the Netherlands.

“San Bernardo was the opportunity to begin to analyze the situation of women following illegal abortions, to think of involuntary motherhood as another form of slavery”, explains the Uruguayan midwife. Elvira lutz, 85 years old.

At that time, says Lutz, there was no access to safe contraceptives, no access to sex education, and abortion was not discussed. “The decision we made was that we were not prepared to continue sacrificing women’s lives “.

“Latin America”, recalls the Uruguayan doctor Cristina Grela (77), who in 1987 founded the regional office of Catholics for the right to decide in Montevideo, recorded a “high number of deaths due to clandestine practices”. Something must be done.

Therefore, Grela’s group and the Abortion Right Commission, created in 1988 in Argentina and managed by lawyer Dora coledesky (now deceased), offered EFLAC a workshop on abortion.

Workshop scheduled for September 28 like the regional day of fight for the right to abortion. “The Brazilians have proposed” this date, recalls the Argentinian gynecologist Alicia cacopardo (now 85 years old), for symbolic reasons.

On September 28, 1871, Brazil adopted the law of “free bellies” which granted freedom to all those born to female slaves. “For us, the freedom of the womb means being able to have an abortion for free,” Grela explains.

The Declaration of Saint Bernard, whose first draft was written by Coledesky -on his old typewriter- and the Argentinian gynecologist Zulema Palma, also proposed to articulate national, regional and international networks to fight for the legalization of abortion. “I have this original in a box,” says Palma, who has worked for several decades in the feminist collective Mujeres al Oeste, in the outskirts of Buenos Aires.

Many of the feminists who were at the San Bernardo workshop recall listening intently to their colleagues in Brazil about the potential of misoprostol to provide safe abortions.

In Brazil, pharmacists and women discovered in the 1980s that a side effect of the drug, marketed as Cytotec, was uterine contractions, and the drug began to be used as an abortion pill. has become an essential contribution for solidarity abortion networks.

“It was very important that we learned about the use of misoprostol there. We didn’t know anything ”, explains the Argentinian epidemiologist Mabel White, 80, dedicated to sexual and reproductive rights at the Foundation for the Study and Research on Women. “The people of Conicet He started to investigate and they told us it was indeed working. And we started to use it. Here, misoprostol was combined with an analgesic drug and was sold under the name Oxaprost, ”explains Cacopardo, who worked for 15 years in a health unit in the province of San Martín in Buenos Aires in gynecological care. basic.

In 2005, the World Health Organization included him in his list of essential drugs. But access to misoprostol remains difficult for many women in Latin America and elsewhere, despite a growing number of countries that have liberalized their abortion laws.

Green scarves

In 2012, Uruguay it was the third Latin American country (after Cuba and Guyana) to decriminalize abortion in the first 12 weeks of gestation. In 2017, Chile he ended the total ban (which had been in effect since the dictatorship of Augusto Pinochet) and authorized abortions in cases of rape, death threat to the woman and fetal non-viability.

The legalization of abortion in Argentina in late 2020 has given a boost to activism in other countries. The green scarves – a symbol of Argentina’s movement for legalization – have crossed borders and are back on the streets, after the COVID-19 pandemic has stopped.

Appears in Ecuador earlier this year, when the Constitutional Court legalized abortion in rape cases, after a long battle waged by feminist groups.

And recently they have also been seen in Mexico, to celebrate that Veracruz and Hidalgo have become the third and fourth states to legalize terminations of pregnancy, and the Supreme Court of Justice ruling, which declared the criminalization of women who abort unconstitutional.

Chilean Matamala says feminists in her country will wear their green scarves again on September 28, during a demonstration around the headquarters of the Constitutional Convention which is drafting a new constitution. The body plans to include in the text the principle of sexual and reproductive autonomy, or even the right to abortion.

Grela, in Uruguay, is less optimistic about the future. “The Catholic Church lock everything. The Chileans have been fighting for years. In Peru, the debate is not making holes. In Colombia […] neither are they considering legal reform, ”he said.

In 1990, one of the youngest in the San Bernardo workshop was the Salvadoran Morena Herrera, who was 30 years old and had just joined his country’s guerrillas, the Farabundo Martí Liberation Front.

“I saw a piece of paper that said abortion debate and I went […] At the time, he had no idea of ​​the great significance that this meeting was going to have. I fell in love with feminism there, ”says Herrera.

Since 2009, she has headed the Citizen Group for the Decriminalization of Avortion, which fights to get dozens of criminalized women out of prison in her country.

Three decades after this meeting, many countries still owe women the full right to decide their bodies. These feminists do not settle for less.

*This is a version of an article originally published by the openDemocracy Documenting the Resistance project