Beyond the Politics of Women’s Bodies: A Reflection on the Debates Around Fertility and Family in Colombia

Colombia is having fewer children than ever. In 2025 the country recorded 441,537 births, its lowest annual total in a decade. The fertility rate has fallen to about one child per woman, down from 1.7 in 2016, according to Colombia’s National Administrative Department of Statistics (Departamento Administrativo Nacional de Estadística).

Colombia’s anti-abortion movement has seized on these figures to push its cause, and it now has an ally in the presidency: Abelardo de la Espriella took office in August after a fiercely contested election, promising a Patria Milagro (Miracle Homeland). He has called the Constitutional Court´s guarantee of abortion rights a ‘monstrosity’ and proposed revisiting it. Meanwhile, the pro-life caucus (Bancada Provida) in Colombia’s Congress has introduced a constitutional reform that would recognize life as beginning at fertilization.

More recently, on 17 September, de la Espriella's government also withdrew Colombia from the Equal Rights Coalition, an international alliance for LGBTIQ+ rights. The date also marks a year since the headline that motivated me to write this article. On 17 September 2025, a banner appeared on the façade of Bogotá’s Capitolio Nacional, depicting a pregnant woman and a message: ‘Salva a Colombia, ten hijos’ (‘Save Colombia, have children’). The display was organised by Colombia’s pro-life caucus as part of the Second Pro-Life Convention 2025.

I felt an unsettling sense of déjà vu, as if a scene from a dystopian novel had escaped the page and landed on the Congress building in Bogotá. Colombia, my home country, was being urged to ‘save’ itself, and women's bodies were to be the instruments of its salvation.

The banner may have looked like something out of The Handmaid’s Tale, but its message reflected something familiar in Colombian history. Whether the country wants fewer children or more, and whether the decision-makers are armed groups or politicians, women’s bodies have long been counted, managed and fought over. Population ageing, falling fertility rates, ‘family values’ and economic growth all somehow return to women's bodies, and rarely with respect to the women who inhabit them.

Perhaps that is because fertility is one of the clearest indicators of demographic change. Births and abortions can be counted, and futures projected – or feared. Meanwhile, media headlines constantly warn us about ageing populations in Europe and Latin America, turning demographic change into yet another cause for alarm.

Or maybe it’s simpler than that: it’s easier to debate women than to include them in the conversation. Those speaking loudest about Colombia’s birth rate, from Congress to the presidency, are rarely the women whose lives these debates will shape. Everyone seems to know what is best, and everyone has an opinion. But the consequences remain deeply personal. The women who carry the pregnancies, raise the children or sit alone in a clinic weighing their options are rarely the ones being heard.

A pattern with a history, carried by women alone

The irony of today’s demographic anxiety is that, not long ago, Colombia’s concern was too many births rather than too few. In the 1960s, the average Colombian woman had around seven children, and high fertility was a concern.

Efforts to expand access to contraception began with a private movement in a deeply conservative society. When gynaecologist Fernando Tamayo founded Profamilia in 1965, he helped bring family planning into the mainstream despite strong opposition from the Catholic Church. By 1969, the government had begun incorporating family planning into public maternal and child health programmes, gradually institutionalising what Profamilia had begun. Today, Profamilia is one of Latin America’s leading sexual and reproductive health organisations.

Over the following decades, however, female sterilisation became Colombia’s most widely used contraceptive method. In their study of Colombian women's contraceptive histories, Bonneuil and Medina traced the steady rise in female sterilisation from the 1980s, which reached around one-third of women by 2000. Its prevalence far exceeded that of any reversible contraceptive method. This tends to surprise my European friends, for whom female sterilisation is far less common as a form of contraception.

For many women, the appeal was practical and even liberating: a one-time procedure that did not depend on a partner’s cooperation, regular clinic visits or a steady supply of pills. But its popularity reflected more than a desire for bodily autonomy.

While many women distrusted reversible methods, men often resisted vasectomy over concerns of virility. The asymmetry persists today: a 2023 study of Colombia’s health-procedure registry found that between 2017 and 2021, women underwent tubal sterilisation roughly four times as often as men underwent vasectomy, a procedure that usually results in fewer complications. The gap is narrowest in Bogotá and widest in the Caribbean, where, in some regions, 77 women undergo sterilisation for every man who undergoes a vasectomy.

The peace baby boom

If we want to understand what shapes fertility in Colombia, it is worth looking at what happened when the guns went quiet.

For decades, women’s bodies were also a battleground for Colombia’s decades-long civil conflict. Svallfors and Billingsley found that as local violence intensified throughout the 1990s and 2000s, women’s use of reversible contraception fell. In the most violent areas, more women chose sterilisation instead, often facing unstable access to clinics or partners. With abortion banned outright until 2006, many women–including survivors of sexual violence inflicted by armed groups and the military–were forced to carry pregnancies they could not end.

Then the fighting partially stopped. A 2024 study found that in the years following the 2016 peace agreement, fertility in municipalities exposed to the conflict rose by 3.2% relative to the rest of the country. The effect was largest where violence had been most intense, a pattern the authors attribute to a greater sense of security and a greater willingness to invest in children.

That is what makes the new government’s choices so striking. Weeks before taking office, de la Espriella announced that he would abolish both the office of the High Commissioner for Peace and dismantle the unit responsible for overseeing the 2016 agreement to ensure ‘no more false peace processes’. Yet the baby boom driven by Colombia’s peace agreement suggests that people have children when they feel safe, stable and hopeful about the future. Not because a banner tells them it is their patriotic duty. Those are the children a country should hope for: children people choose to have, not pregnancies imposed by violence and lack of options.

Fewer girls becoming mothers

Yet one feature of today’s fertility decline rarely makes it into the debate: Who, exactly, is having fewer children?

A recent study by Colombia’s Banco de la República, drawing on every birth record from 1998 to 2024, documents how births have declined while women have increasingly had children later in life. Much of this change has been driven by the youngest mothers: fertility among adolescents aged 15 to 19 fell by 51.1% in under a decade, the largest decline of any age group. Reducing teenage pregnancy has long been a public-health goal, so a significant part of what is now framed as a demographic crisis is also a major achievement in public health: fewer girls becoming mothers before finishing school.

The numbers, then, tell a more complicated story than the political rhetoric suggests. A constitutional reform declaring that life begins at fertilisation would thus likely land hardest on the youngest and poorest girls. To understand Colombia's demographic transition, we need to look beyond how many children are born and ask under which circumstances people–and especially vulnerable young girls–become parents.

Where are the fathers?

Growing up, I never heard my mother, aunts nor any of the amazing women around me discuss fertility rates. They talked about juggling family life with long, inflexible working hours, figuring out what to cook for dinner yet again, difficult pregnancies, exhausting commutes, contraception and countless other everyday concerns women face.

The uneven burden of raising children in Colombia is reflected in its demographics. The country records one of the highest shares of births outside marriage in the world, with about 87% of births occurring outside of wedlock according to a study by the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development. Many of these children are born to cohabiting couples, a long-standing and widely accepted family arrangement in Colombia.

A more revealing figure: 32.6% of Colombian children under 15 live with their mother but not their father, despite their father being alive. When unions end, it is usually the mother who raises the children alone, in one of Latin America´s most unequal countries. Jokes about fathers who went out for milk or bread and never came back are a cliché in Colombia, but for many women considering motherhood, the fear of raising a child alone is real.

Still, absent fathers are only part of the story. For most Colombian children, their father does remain in their lives. The question is what happens–or what doesn’t–when he’s there.

Colombia’s 2024–2025 time-use survey offers an answer: Women spend 7 hours and 35 minutes a day on unpaid work and childcare, compared with 3 hours and 14 minutes for men. This pattern is not unique to Colombia. Globally, the International Labour Organization estimates that women perform around three-quarters of unpaid care work worldwide. What stands out is how stubborn the gap is in Colombia. The figure persists with income or education, and the gap is often larger in two-parent households than in single-mother ones.

So much for the traditional family: a two-parent household, with women bearing an unequal share of the work. The banner on the Capitolio Nacional asked women to have more children. It had nothing to say about the men expected to help raise them.

The politics of who gets blamed

The pro-life banner was merely one expression of a much broader, oversimplified debate about Colombia’s falling fertility rate and changing family structures. One that reduces Colombia's demographic future to a single political responsibility: women's. Not as citizens with choices, ambitions and rights, but as reproductive bodies expected to ‘save the country’. My fear is that this debate is only beginning, and that it will remain easier to tell women what to do with their bodies than to ask how Colombian families are really changing.

Don’t let me be misunderstood – the concerns behind the debate are real. An ageing population will strain pensions, health care and families themselves, and a country with one child per woman must prepare for that. But when the conversation begins and ends with women’s bodies, the conclusion is predetermined: women must do more, sacrifice more and give birth to more.

Meanwhile, everyone else is left from the picture: the fathers who go out for milk and never come back, and those who stay but do little of the unpaid care; mothers raising children alone; the women who survived reproductive violence during decades of armed conflict; girls in remote areas who become mothers when they should be in playgrounds; and the millions of women like those in my family, whose everyday conversations about work, money, pregnancy and contraception rarely reach the halls of Congress.

Widen the frame, and better questions emerge. What makes parenthood possible in the first place? Who bears its economic and emotional costs? Why is motherhood treated as a national duty while care remains largely a private burden? And which families do politicians mean when they speak of defending ‘the traditional Colombian family’? None of that fits on a banner.

Meanwhile, cuts to Colombia’s national statistical office risk undermining our ability to understand these changes just when reliable data matters most. The women in my family taught me why numbers matter long before I had the language for it. Their stories were never a substitute for demographic evidence; they gave it a human face. Statistics are indispensable, but they can also be wielded selectively, turning complex social realities into convenient political rhetoric. Behind every rate is a person; behind every household statistic, a family.

Colombia needs better policies and an honest conversation about its demographic future – not a dystopian rescue plan written on women’s bodies, built on restrictions and nostalgia for a ‘traditional family’ that no longer reflects how many Colombians live.

Perhaps a good place to start would be asking women what they actually want.

Sofía García Durrer is a PhD candidate in the DYNAMICS Research Training Group, a joint program of the Hertie School and Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin. She holds bachelor’s degrees in economics and political science from the University of Mannheim and a Master of Public Policy from the Hertie School. The views and opinions in this article are solely those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views or positions of DYNAMICS, the Hertie School, Humboldt-Universität, or TGP.