Albaladejo, Angelika. “A ‘Witch Hunt Against Poor Women’: Across the Americas, Abortion Laws are Harming Health and Security.” World Policy Journal 33, no. 4 (December 2016): 26–34. https://doi.org/10.1215/07402775-3812906.

In “A ‘Witch Hunt Against Poor Women’: Across the Americas, Abortion Laws are Harming Health and Security”, Angelika Albaladejo argues for the reproductive rights of women in Latin America. She starts off by summarizing the current laws in place regarding abortion use, as well as access to reproductive health, in El Salvador and Columbia. She uses specific cases in El Salvador and Columbia to demonstrate the severe conditions and unjust consequences brought onto the women in these countries due to the current legislation in place. Albaladejo also explains that the ongoing conflict in Columbia restricts any progressive movements or legislation aimed at introducing reproductive rights from succeeding and further argues that reproductive health must be fought for along with the fight for a solution to the ongoing conflict. She then compares Latin American legislation and its consequences to the legislation in place in the United States. She ends the article by addressing the international challenge in securing reproductive rights for women due to the restrictions on foreign involvement in many Latin American countries, as well as in the United States, and the lack of enforcement and implementation of global agreements.

This article was included in the World Policy Journal which is published by Duke University Press, a highly accredited academic publisher. Angelika Albaladejo is an independent journalist who has been published by a variety of highly accredited publishers such as the World Policy Journal and the British Medical Journal. Albaladejo does a very good job in explaining the current laws in place in El Salvador and Columbia, as well as in the United States and the consequences they have in a daily woman’s life in those countries. Albaladejo focused on presenting the current effects of the legislation in order to argue for more progressive reproductive rights rather than trying to answer the question of how or why these laws came about. Moreover, her presentation of the information is very clear and easy to understand. She focuses on personal stories as evidence, as well as a handful of broad statistics, but her article is mostly argumentative rather than informative. The intended audience was most likely a student audience looking for a broad understanding of the current issues surrounding reproductive access in Latin America.

This article was very useful to obtain a broad understanding of the current legislation in Latin America surrounding reproductive health. It was also helpful in exposing a few angles in which one could study reproductive rights in Latin America. This article will most likely be used to refer to personal accounts and current legislation. However, even though she lays out a good overview of the current laws, she does not give an overview of the historical context or the rise of the conservative thinking around abortion in the countries she mentioned. This would be useful in dissecting how and why the current legislation was written and passed. The next step in this particular research project would be to find resources that explain the historical context of the legislation written about in Albaladejo article.