The Human Rights Violations of Abortion Bans

On today’s episode of Justice Matters, co-host Maggie Gates talks with Karla Torres and Catalina Martinez Coral from the Center for Reproductive Rights. On November 8, 2023, the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights (IACHR) held a landmark hearing on the human rights violations caused by the reversal of Roe v. Wade and the move to ban abortion in the United States.

The IACHR is a principle and autonomous body of the organization of American States that monitors human rights across the Americas. The hearing was requested by the Center for Reproductive Rights and 13 other US organizations focused on reproductive health rights and justice, disability rights, and human rights. In this conversation, Torres and Coral discuss the hearing, abortion as an essential human right, the Dobbs decision in the U.S., the feminist-led Legal and Social decriminalization of abortion in Latin America and its impact on the world, and the future of abortion rights in the U.S.

Karla Torres has been senior human rights counsel at the Center for Reproductive Rights since 2017. She works within the U.S. Human Rights Team and collaborates with staff across various departments, including the U.S. Policy and Advocacy and U.S. Litigation teams, as well as the Center's Global Legal Program. Torres most recently served as a program officer at Equality Now, where she worked in close partnership with grassroots organizations in the Americas to expose human rights violations against women and girls and to promote legal frameworks that would protect against these violations.

Catalina Martinez Corral is a feminist from Cali, Colombia. She's currently the vice president for Latin America and the Caribbean at the Center for Reproductive Rights. She is a member of the Causa Justa Movement and one of the plaintiffs in the historic ruling that partially decriminalized abortion in Colombia.