Over the past 15 years, Human Rights Watch has published several reports on the impact of the criminalization of abortion, including eight on countries in Latin America and the Caribbean. In all cases, Human Rights Watch concluded that legal frameworks that criminalize abortion create an environment in which women and girls resort to unsafe procedures that endanger their health and lives. Human Rights Watch published a report and video in 2018 documenting the harmful consequences of the Dominican Republic`s abortion ban, based on interviews with dozens of women and girls who have had unwanted pregnancies and resorted to unsafe abortion methods, often putting themselves at risk to their health and lives. Research has shown that banning abortion in the country contributes to preventable maternal health complications and deaths, causing disproportionate harm to women and girls in rural and low-income areas who are less likely to have access to safer abortion methods or travel to another country where abortion is legal. When we discuss the issue of abortion, we must ask and answer the following questions: When does human life arise? Should human life be given the same value and dignity at all stages of development? Both issues were raised in a landmark divorce case in 1989 in the state of Tennessee, USA. The central topic of the discussion was the determination of the « person » status of seven small human embryos belonging to the divorced couple. The couple had « created » the embryos and placed them in reserve in seven test tubes in the freezer of a medical laboratory. Dr. Jerome Lejeune left Paris, France, to participate in the process as the most eminent expert in the field. At the time, he was the most respected geneticist in the world after discovering the genetic cause of Down syndrome.
He described the conception of a baby in the womb as « the encounter between a sperm and an egg that produces a new human being because one`s own human and personal constitution is fully defined. Fertilization creates a personal constitution that is quite typical of this person, who has never existed before and will never exist. I must say that there is no difficulty in understanding that at the beginning of life, the genetic information, the molecular structure of the egg, the mind, matter, soul and body are already completely united, because this is the beginning of a new miracle that we call the non-human being. There is no doubt that he is a human, because he is not a chimpanzee being, so he is a human. The court agreed with him that the seven embryos were human beings with rights and not objects of property, as if they were plastic toys. For Dr. Bruce Carlson, human embryologist, professor of human embryology and anatomy from 1966 to 2004 at the University of Michigan School of Medicine, author of the text « Human Embryology and Developmental Biology », which is used as a textbook in American medical schools, director of multiple researches in the field of embryology in Russia, Czechoslovakia, Finland and the Netherlands said: that a list of structures of four systems of an adult human, nervous, circulatory, respiratory and digestive, has been observed in ten-millimeter embryos, the size of a five-week-old creature. A five-week-old creature contains 106 components of the nervous system, 63 components of the circulatory system, 40 components of the digestive system and 40 components of the respiratory system. Having established the origin of human life at the time of conception, it is important to determine whether this human life should be accorded the same value and dignity at all stages of development. Whether the figures are accurate or not, this confirms that the denial of the right to abortion does not eliminate the need to terminate a pregnancy and instead leads women to risk their lives and put their health at risk. The Constitutional Court declares the criminalization of consensual abortion enforceable, in the sense that the crime is not configured if the behavior is performed before the 24th week of pregnancy, and without subjecting this limit if the reasons set out in the C-355 judgment of 2006 are set out. We will continue to comment on each of the four hypotheses and the reasons why we reject them, provided that the inalienable right to life does not provide for exceptions: in the first two cases, when the pregnancy is the result of rape or an incestuous relationship, it has been proven that women who have been victims of rape or incest, Suffer from trauma such as depression.
Feelings of guilt, low self-esteem and uncontrollable sadness.