We are a Latin American and Caribbean Network of feminist and lesbian-feminist organizations/colletives that accompany women, men and other people undergoing abortions.
We are also a possibility of inter-regional alliance and a collaborative platform between organizations, both in knowledge exchange and in the construction of information, evidence and systematization. We seek to be part of the local and global political incidence, challenging the knowledge of colonial hegemonic medicine, teaching and learning among ourselves how to perform feminist and caring abortions.
We accompany the contexts in which patriarchal sexual violence is perpetuated. We do our work in the midst of deep political, social and economic crises in the territories we inhabit, which are militarized and influenced by neoliberalism.
We base our strategies on the experiences of those who have abortions and recognize them as women, girls and beings with strength and courage, even when they are still facing these situations.
We recognize the ancestral knowledge of the genealogy of abortion and we know that the remedies are a recent invention in comparison with the millenarian practice of abortion.
We accompany and give special importance to the experience of our lives and to the lives of the people we accompany. We also accompany and transform human relationships. With these experiences we are generating other ways of sustenance for our existence, which bring other possible realities in the face of the precariousness that the system offers us.
"The political mode of accompaniment is respecting the life and health of women, without bureaucratizing abortions, with an attentive listening and face-to-face meetings. A supportive accompaniment is based on the needs of women, not on suffering and not on total respect for their decisions".
We are part of the feminist movements that defend legal abortion in our countries and our horizon is the decriminalization of abortion. So that never again will abortion be considered a crime.
We want a free abortion, without specific causes and with week limits.
We ask the States to stop any attempt of persecution against people who make accompaniments.
Political Principles
Principle 1.
We unite through feminist ways of accompanying and understanding abortions, understanding the diversity and different forms of each collective in their places of action.
We provide accompaniment based on love and total respect for the autonomy of women and people with the capacity to have an abortion, making use of the active shield, not bureaucratizing abortions, that is, without specific causes, without delays, without the addition of obstacles.
Women are the women in charge of their own lives and are the protagonists of their own abortion processes. We accompany these people from a horizontal relationship based on their needs, recognizing their resources and their capacity to act.
We take abortion as an action to take care of the life and health of women and people with the capacity to abort as a daily practice that we seek to be done without fear, without guilt, without dependence and for pleasure.
Principle 2.
We recognize the experience of abortion as a situation crossed by the diverse realities in which women and people with the capacity to abort are immersed; therefore, understanding abortion from a social, sexual and reproductive justice perspective allows us to accompany it with an intersectional perspective that prioritizes the needs of those people belonging to social sectors historically disadvantaged in their rights and/or in conditions of vulnerability.
Principle 3.
We recognize ourselves, together with the women and people with the capacity to abort that we accompany, as those who produce knowledge by making theory from practice. We question the medical hegemony based on the information we gather through experiences of accompaniment.
We promote the right to information as a political tool that allows access to safe abortions and prioritizes autonomy over medical hegemony.
Principle 4.
We are committed to community building together with the women and people with the capacity to abort that we accompany. We believe that the experience of abortion can be lived in community and that the work of the network strengthens a way of resisting together the system of domination and exploitation in which we live.
Priorities of the Regional Network
In an exercise of dialogue and collective construction, we defined the priorities of the Latin American and Caribbean Feminist Network of Abortion Supporters in the short and medium term. They can be summarized in three:
1) Strengthening of the Regional Network
This priority is about how to strengthen the regional articulation that we are building, so that the Regional Network can be part of the daily life in each of the territories where there are national groups/organizations/networks that are part of it.
Being part of this Regional Network allows us to develop joint and collective response strategies, understanding that this process is not unilateral, but is based on the possibility that all of us in the Network can contribute and have a sense of belonging.
2) Join us to accompany us
This priority is on the creation of spaces for exchange, joint learning and training of all the local groups/organizations/networks that integrate the Regional Network, which allows us to improve the way we do the accompaniment in our territories.
This priority also refers to the Regional Network's accompaniment of political and public advocacy actions in each country when discussions about the possibility of progress or regression on abortion are presented.
It also refers to the process in which trust generates sustainability, strengthening of the exchange and the possibility of seeing the actions of all our regional scope to guarantee abortion in each territory through each group or member group.
3) Knowledge generation
From the Regional Network we want to be in regional and global decision-making spaces. Political spaces where knowledge related to abortion is being disputed and debated. For example, in the updates of the World Health Organization guide. This component refers to the power to produce:
- Joint publications;
- Systematization of regional data on abortion;
- Evidence from our daily practice as medical abortion escorts;
- Generation of knowledge that allows us to recover abortion as a natural and daily practice, and to create a positive discourse on the subject.
Once the dialogue and debate on the Regional Network's priorities were completed, the mission and vision that will guide our long-term actions were developed.
Missão:
Our mission is to be a space of strengthening, exchange and articulation between the collectives/networks/organizations of abortion companions in Latin America and the Caribbean, to aggregate, potentiate and improve the way we accompany medical abortion and, at the same time, to have a strategic impact on the debates for the decriminalization/legalization of abortion in each of our territories.
Visão:
Our vision is that Latin America and the Caribbean become territories where women and people with the capacity to have an abortion can do it with autonomy, accompanied by feminists who promote free abortion and make accompaniment based on social justice, happiness, joy and happiness.
Short-term priority actions:
The debate on priorities at the 2020 Regional Meeting also shows the priority actions that, in the short term, over a period of two years, we want to carry out as a Regional Network. The Driving Group will be the structure responsible for the realization of these priority actions.
At the next Regional Meeting of the Network, an evaluation of what we propose to do will be carried out and new priority actions will be defined.
We detail below the priority actions that will be central to the work of the Regional Network between 2020 and 2022.
- Priority 1: Strengthening of the Latin American and Caribbean Feminist Network of abortion escorts
This priority will operate in these two years around the following actions:
- The construction of the collective identity of the Network, which will allow us to position it both regionally and in each of the territories where there are participants.
- Generation of internal communication channels among the members of the Network to improve the communication we have among us.
- To improve the strategies for the referral of women and other people with abortion capacity in countries where there are members of the Regional Network.
- Priority 2: Join us to accompany us
This priority will operate in these two years around the following actions:
- Generation of training spaces to strengthen the knowledge around the accompaniment in 2T and 3T;
- Generation of spaces for exchange and strengthening around the safety and holistic protection of companions;
- Accompaniment of political and public advocacy actions in each locality where there is the possibility of progress or threats of setbacks regarding abortion.
- Priority 3: Knowledge generation
At the 2020 Meeting, no priority action was defined for this short-term component, since it was decided that during those two years we should concentrate on strengthening the Regional Network and accompanying the companions.
