Bogotá - Colombia - May 2024
With the horizon of free abortion, we deepen the weaving of collective threads.
On May 2, 3 and 4, 2024, the networks and collectives that are part of Red Compañera met again to strengthen and extend our ties.
We began by giving ourselves a map of offerings about our aboriginal work. Recognizing the colonial traces that inhabit our territories, we offer ourselves objects that show that it is possible to erase the state borders, to weave plots that sustain us. Those wefts that we knew and know how to assemble, disassemble, tighten, to get to recognize ourselves in these years.
During three intense days of meetings and discussions, 22 networks from 17 Latin American and Caribbean countries came together in Bogotá to give meaning to the bonds, questions, and commitments that call us to build this Red Compañera. We reaffirm our commitment:
To continue building this Network as a space to politicize accompaniments and activate for free, safe, feminist, legal abortions.
In a region marked by the growing advance of the far right and the criminalization of those of us who struggle and resist, we came together to analyze how these political changes impact our activism. Through these reflections, we sought to envision and share ways to continue building practices and strategies to confront them.
We discussed the advances and setbacks that we are going through in our territories in terms of legalization and decriminalization of abortion, events that directly affect women, girls, transmasculinities and non-binary people, in their possibilities of having an abortion. These effects are even more unequal when it comes to racialized people, given the imbrications of oppressions of the existing power structures. We envision how to continue pushing processes of organization, articulation and struggles to decriminalize and legalize abortion in our countries.
To look at each other, support one another, build political trust for this loving struggle: a praxis and pedagogy of radical tenderness against the cruelty of transnational conservative right-wing forces.
For the networks and collectives that make up Red Compañera, accompaniment transforms the often solitary and secret experience of abortion into a collective one—and, as such, into an act of care and respect for personal autonomy in the pursuit of social, sexual, and (non)reproductive justice. Over the past two years, this Network has endured and grown. In 2023 alone, 862 accompaniers supported access to approximately 55,888 safe abortions. We have made more dignified access possible for the women, children, adolescents, trans, and non-binary people who reached out to us and whom we accompanied.
Network articulation for collective action is our founding characteristic. We are interested in the construction of situated knowledge on the activism that we deploy and from there to dispute meanings from other doings and practices. A theoretical and political bet that allows us to question the medical hegemonies in several directions: in relation to the abortion process itself, in relation to the stigmatizing narratives and -also- in relation to the changes of subjective positioning on the part of activism.
How to design anti-racist accompaniments? What are and where are the modes of empowerment embodied in society as a whole and in our activisms in particular? What is the knowledge produced by the networks of accompaniers of trans and non-binary people? What are the specificities of accompaniments for girls and adolescents? Some of these questions were raised in the circles of political conversations that we had. It is that the deconstructive work also moves us and occupies us.
Finally, we are dedicated to thinking about our organizational forms and the need to deepen the pluridiverse fabric that brings us together. The collective life, the activist life, that space that sinks its roots in far-reaching genealogies, in this present that we produce and the future that we hope for.
At the 4th Assembly we agreed that it is key to insist on:
- Our creativity to surf adversity collectively.
- The interest and commitment to the organization because it is important to continue building care policies and other affective narratives about abortion.
- The need to guarantee accompaniment organizations access to flexible, adaptable and sustainable resources to support their work while respecting organizational autonomy.
- To link our work and build alliances between feminist organizations with processes and struggles for the decriminalization and legalization of abortion and therefore dialogues with pedagogy, universities, social, popular, indigenous and community movements.
- Strengthen linkages between networks of abortion accompaniers in the global south, as they are vital to address the structural inequalities that exist in this world.
- We will continue to insist on the necessary debates to build this network according to our dreams. We reaffirm that these opened a path to continue in the process of being an anti-racist, anti-capacity, trans-inclusive network that organizes its collective plots to accompany all people who have abortions and that we learn every day to look at the specificities of those we accompany.
