.- A 17 year-old member of the Marxist rebel group FARC who is three months pregnant has escaped from the organization to avoid being forced to undergo an abortion and to save the life of her child. She revealed that forced abortions are a common practice in the rebel group.
According to the Colombian daily “El Tiempo,” the young girl known as “Nicole” was forced by her commanders to drink solutions intended to provoke an abortion. She escaped on December 19 and turned herself in to government forces.
“My comrades dropped me off in a home in the small town of Nazareno en Planadas, with a bunch of explosives, and since they warned me about the abortion, I took advantage of the moment and I fled,” she said. She was taken in by the Colombian Institute for Family Well-Being.
Nicole joined the FARC when she was 10 years old—the Marxist group commonly recruits young girls for its ranks.
According to doctors at the University Hospital of Neiva, Nicole will have a high-risk pregnancy. She is stable and the unborn child is healthy, but doctors have yet to determine if the baby was affected by the abortion solutions she was forced to drink.
