Abstract

GOMEZ-DAVILA, Joaquín Guillermo. Abortion: a look from the perspectives of public health, rights and social justice. Rev Colomb Obstet Ginecol [online]. 2018, vol.69, n.1, pp.53-64. ISSN 0034-7434.  https://doi.org/10.18597/rcog.3009.

Unsafe abortion is a problem of public health, rights and social justice, particularly so for women living in developing countries. Consequently, public health is called upon to protect dignity, promote the exercise of rights and create the right conditions to ensure that women can have control over their own reproductive autonomy. The article analyses three schools of distributive justice, examines their strengths and contradictions, and concludes that capability building, with its resulting social justice, that derives from these, would be the ideal approach to the issue of abortion in medium and low income countries; and that, for a public health system intent of achieving the highest degree of health and wellbeing, it secures the basic material conditions required for capabilities to flourish becoming the best alternative for greater participation in the construction of individual life projects; it would consider the reality of the people in their sociocultural environments and would allow to pull the female world out of the private realm to allow a public debate on these matters and prevent them from being considered as "natural" unchangeable aspects of human relations. This would ensure greater relevance in terms of meeting the needs of each population. The article also highlights that the social justice that characterises this approach will not come from the top, from the State, but requires collective participation, where movements that oppose hegemony play a very important role and are active in building their own capabilities.

Keywords : Public health; social justice; human rights; unsafe abortion; utilitarianism; political liberalism; capability building.

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