Colombia Regulates Comprehensive Health Care for Abortion

On Tuesday, the administration of President Gustavo Petro issued a single regulation to guarantee comprehensive abortion care.

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The new standard establishes that health institutions provide this procedure under quality standards such as accessibility, safety, comprehensiveness, relevance, satisfaction, effectiveness, efficiency, and continuity.

"Human dignity, reproductive self-determination, equality and non-discrimination are, among others, the principles that guide the voluntary termination of pregnancy," the Health Ministry said in a statement.

In 2022, the Constitutional Court decided to decriminalize abortion up to the 24th week of pregnancy. Although this decision put Colombia in the Latin American forefront of regulations on this issue, Colombian women still face barriers to accessing the full exercise of their rights.

Besides changing the article 122 of the Penal Code, the Constitutional Court maintained three causes for abortion that do not have a deadline: health and risk of the mother; malformation of the fetus, and rape or incest. Until then, a woman who aborted could be sentenced up to 54 months in prison.

Health Ministry's approach to comprehensive care includes considerations related to age, education level, ethnicity, socioeconomic status, gender identity, disability status, and place of residence.

The comprehensive abortion care is also guaranteed for "every person with the biological capacity to become pregnant and go through the gestation process, which includes transgender men, transmasculinities, non-binary people or intersex people, without excluding other gender identities."