This story by Grecia Flores Hinostroza originally appeared on Global Voices on October 4, 2025. 

In Peru, women’s rights exist in a strange paradox: on paper, we have the laws, the representation, and the international commitments that promise equality; in reality, our lives tell a different story. Political progress coexists alongside persistent neglect, with numbers that flatter and figures that fail. This contradiction is not hidden in the shadows — the painful contrast is written plainly in the numbers we so proudly display.

According to the SDG Gender Index, Peru scores 72.9 for “Proportion of seats held by women in national parliaments,” a figure that suggests progress, visibility, and leadership. And yet, when we shift our gaze to health, the score drastically drops to 35.5, barely half. Women are present in Congress, but absent from the healthcare system that should protect them.

If political participation alone were enough, our streets would be safer, our hospitals accessible, and our voices heard beyond the voting booth. But in Peru, as in much of Latin America, representation has not broken the chains of inequality — it has simply made them less visible to those who govern.

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The data tells one story. The lives of rural, Indigenous, and poor women tell another — one where access to basic sexual and reproductive health services is a distant reality. Where hospitals, experts, and care are unreachable. As the political scientist Stéphanie Rousseau notes in “The Politics of Reproductive Health in Peru,” “Although health sector reforms have had some positive impact on women’s reproductive health, the many restrictions placed on women’s right to reproductive choices have blocked further progress.”

The consequences are not abstract. In 2020, Peru’s maternal mortality ratio stood at 69 deaths per 100,000 live births, according to the World Health Organization, far above the Latin American average of 45 and nearly five times that of Chile (16) and Uruguay (13). These numbers represent women whose lives could have been saved by timely care, safe births and the fulfilment of rights already recognized by law.

But these injustices are not only moral failures; they are legal betrayals. Peru has signed its name beneath international promises: the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women (CEDAW), the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (ICCPR), and others. These are not distant treaties gathering dust in diplomatic archives. They are binding commitments, written to safeguard the dignity, health, and safety of women — commitments meant to reach every hospital room, courtroom, and remote village in our country.

Laws protecting sexual and reproductive health rights exist on paper, but they remain distant from the realities of rural, Indigenous, and poor women. Clinics lack essential services. Comprehensive reproductive care is unavailable. Legal frameworks declare equality, but equality disappears in places where women still face forced pregnancies, unsafe births, and systemic neglect.

The Constitution speaks of equality, but equality does not walk the roads where women carry their pregnancies alone. The Ministry of Health issues protocols, but those protocols do not save lives when the nearest health centre is closed, or when the only doctor is gone. Rights without access are hollow. Commitments without implementation are betrayal.

In this context, political representation must not be mistaken for liberation. We cannot accept the illusion of progress that comes from more women in office if it is not matched by concrete action to dismantle structural barriers. Empowerment is not an empty slogan — it is the lived reality without fear, accessing healthcare without barriers, and raising one’s voice without retaliation.

The gap between law and life is not an abstract policy flaw; it is a daily crisis. It is the young girl in a rural province forced to give birth after sexual assault because abortion is inaccessible. It is the mother who dies on the way to a hospital that never has the capacity to treat her. Likewise, it is the Indigenous community where reproductive rights exist only in the language of faraway courts, not in the practice of local healthy systems.

If we measure success only by the presence of women in power, we ignore the absence of justice in their communities. Numbers in parliament cannot compensate for empty maternity wards. International recognition cannot replace the right to safe childbirth.

I call on the Peruvian Congress to legislate not for appearances, but for autonomy. To ensure that health, safety, and dignity are realities in every province. I call on international donors to fund the fight for reproductive freedom, not just political participation. And I call on Peruvian society to recognize that representation without rights is no victory at all.

Representation matters. But it is only the beginning. Real empowerment is when every woman controls her future — her body, her health, her voice — regardless of where she was born or how far she lives from the capital. Until the day, the paradox will remain, and progress will be a promise half-kept. [VS]

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