The UN urged Peru to relax its abortion stance. Lawmakers did the opposite
Camila’s body folds in on itself, eyes fixated on the cuffs of her sweater and thick black hair shielding her face. The 19-year-old, an Indigenous teenager from the Peruvian mountains, sits close to her lawyer, arms touching, in a small office overlooking Lima’s skyline. In clipped and hushed sentences, she begins her story.
At the age of 9, Camila was raped by her father. He ordered her not to tell anyone, threatening to kill her and her mother and brother if she did. For a while, his threats worked and she stayed silent. His vicious assault was the start of years of violence, abuse that would make Camila pregnant at the age of 13 and leave her ostracized from her community.
“I was so alone,” Camila tells New Lines in her first interview with the media. (Camila is a pseudonym given by her lawyers in coordination with her). “People in the town would stare at me. I stopped going to school,” she says, sitting small and slumped, her face buried in her hands. She pauses for a moment, and says she wishes to continue.
Requests for an abortion were repeatedly ignored by authorities, forcing the teenager to continue with the high-risk pregnancy. At three months in, Camila suffered a miscarriage — a loss that would lead to her being falsely accused, investigated and convicted.
Her case, “Camila v. Peru,” brought to the United Nations by a local reproductive rights organization, resulted in a historic ruling last summer that found the Peruvian state had violated Camila’s rights. The U.N.’s Committee on the Rights of the Child also urged Peru to decriminalize abortion in all cases of child pregnancy and provide compensation for Camila to rebuild her life.
But Camila is yet to receive any money, and has been unable to return to her community. “Women’s issues here are largely ignored. They do not care about us,” she says.
