Venezuelan women cross into Colombia for abortions they cannot legally have at home, only to find that this “right” is not always easy to reach
In Venezuela, abortion remains a crime. In Colombia, since a landmark Constitutional Court ruling in 2022, it has been legal for up to 24 weeks. The distance between those two facts, measured in river crossings, missing documents, and hostile waiting rooms, is charted by a recent investigation by the feminist Colombian outlet, Volcánicas.
The piece opens not at the border but in a coastal Venezuelan city, where on February 5 this year, police raided a medical clinic and arrested a 69-year-old obstetrician allegedly mid-procedure. The doctor, Frank Peña, had delivered children for generations of local families. Dozens came out to defend him online and in the streets; one TikTok user described him as her gynaecologist for 26 years, through three pregnancies. The woman being treated at the time of the raid was transferred to another clinic. Official reports say her vital signs were stabilised. Whether she was ultimately able to make her own decision about her body is not recorded.
Absences – inadequate information, protection and recourse – are at the core of this article. Journalist Mariángela Urbina Castilla goes through the key elements of Venezuela’s crisis: a penal code that criminalises both the person who aborts and the person who performs the abortion; a healthcare system operating at a “fraction of its capacity” due to years of political and social crisis; a long-standing contraceptive shortage; and religious groups that have continued to accumulate political influence through each successive crisis. Magdymar León Torrealba, a clinical psychologist and director of Venezuela’s leading sexual education association, is clear about the consequences: criminalisation doesn’t prevent abortion, it silences it. Women internalise the fear of being judged, reported, or mistreated. They delay. They manage alone.
For many, travelling to Colombia is the response. That country’s 2022 legal ruling is explicit: all women on Colombian territory, regardless of nationality or immigration status, are entitled to a free, timely abortion through the health system. No documents required. No payment. No delay. According to organisations working with migrant women, the lived reality is different. They are asked for papers they don’t have. They are told to pay. They are shuffled between appointments and worn down until many simply give up. The Mesa por la Vida y la Salud de las Mujeres association (Table for Women’s Life and Health) has been by the side of two hundred women in this situation since 2022. Those are only the ones that managed to reach them in the first place.
Castilla follows four women through the maze. Victoria, a Venezuelan journalist living in Bogotá, was still breastfeeding her first child when she unintentionally fell pregnant a second time. She knew the law and she used it – she explicitly named the court ruling when a functionary tried to delay her access and was treated the same day. She was assigned at random to a doctor who wore a green handkerchief in her hair and had a sign on the wall that read: “You decide, I follow.” Victoria paid nothing. She is clear that in Venezuela, the same process would have been, in her words, “a nightmare”.
Yolima, a 25-year-old migrant from Venezuela and mother of three, was facing a fourth unwanted pregnancy with no support network or stable income. Frightened, she shared her story with some in her local community, and through the kindness of strangers the word spread. A health official made a referral. A rights’ monitor made calls. Costs – including transport, cost and accommodation — were covered by local associations. As a result of such support, Yolima was able to access the care she needed with dignity. A spokesperson for one of the associations notes: “a trajectory of exclusion was transformed into a story of success and care”.
Only a bridge separates the border towns of Ipiales, Colombia, and Tulcán, Ecuador, where activist Yanni Ximena Caicedo has spent years building infrastructure to help women in need. It started with a Google search of what women in Ecuador might face. The results were, she says, terrifying: unsafe providers and fundamentalist misinformation. She is Catholic, an anthropologist, and known in her city as “Yanni, the abortion one.” After the 2022 ruling, she began crossing into Ecuador to spread the word of the new rights women were entitled to in Colombia. Ecuadorian women of means, she notes, come to Ipiales to terminate pregnancies discreetly, in hotels. Venezuelan migrant women are treated differently – not with gentle social condemnation but stigmatised as incapable of mothering anyway.
Tatiana Cordero, coordinator of the feminist organisation Mujer y Futuro in the Colombian city of Bucaramanga, rounds out the picture. She spent years navigating bureaucratic certification processes to register her organisation as a healthcare provider to help Venezuelan women becoming, in her own account, architect, engineer, and nurse. Now her organisation offers teleconsultations and sends medications by post, reaching women in Chocó, Medellín, and wherever else they are, up to ten weeks of gestation. Given the amount charged by local hospitals in the state of Santander to perform an abortion – 14 million pesos rather than a national average of five – it can make sense to fly women to Bogotá for treatment. “It’s a form of conscientious objection through pricing”, she says.
The article ends where it begins: at the border. On one side of this line, the right to abortion exists. On the other, it does not. In between, there are women who have spent years building the bridge; one body at a time, one decision at a time.
The original article ‘Del puente para acá abortas’ by Mariángela Urbina Castilla was published in Spanish by Volcánicas on March 16, 2026.
It is available here.
Volcánicas is an independent Colombian feminist journalism outlet founded in 2017 that specialises in gender, reproductive rights, and social justice reporting.
