It was Simone Veil, the late French politician and champion of women’s rights, who pushed through the decriminalization of abortion in France in 1975.

“No woman resorts to an abortion with a light heart. One only has to listen to them: It is always a tragedy,” she told France’s parliament in 1974, a year after the U.S. Supreme Court granted federal access to abortion for American women in Roe v. Wade. And while Ms. Veil suffered fierce insults and threats at the time, a woman’s right to abortion has largely been a settled affair in France for the past half-century.

That’s not to say it has not come under threat, from conservative Catholics and the far-right. But while abortion has cleaved the United States in one of the nation’s longest standing culture wars, in France it has been considered a matter of public health.

Since the U.S. Supreme Court ruling on Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization last month rolled back abortion access for American women, however, protests have erupted in Paris and around the country that are indistinguishable from their counterparts in Minneapolis; Birmingham, Alabama; and Boston.

“The right to abortion is just as fragile in France as in the United States,” says Amandine Cormier, a math teacher who attended a protest over the weekend in the French capital. “We can see what happens in the United States and Poland when conservative parties rise to power. The first thing that goes is women’s rights, and abortion is a powerful symbol of that.” 

Philippe Wopjazer/AP/File

Simone Veil (left), dressed in the French Academician's uniform, poses in the library of the Institut de France before a ceremony in Paris in March 2010. Ms. Veil, a Nazi death camp survivor and prominent French politician, spearheaded abortion rights.

To ward off such an outcome in France, it has been proposed that the right to abortion be enshrined in the constitution, a move backed by 81% of respondents in a recent poll.

It’s a sign of how the Dobbs decision has reverberated around the globe, and how countries and reproductive rights advocates have mobilized to secure women’s rights at home. It has raised complicated questions about how best to do that, and whether measures to legislate or codify abortion might backfire – and in some cases even work against female equality.

The decision has also put many foreign activists, who once looked to the United States as a beacon when it came to reproductive equality, in the unexpected position of aiding the American women who once aided them.

“For these women in the U.S. who were born with a right, and grew up knowing this was their right, to wake up one day and say ‘you can’t anymore’ is a gut-punch to morale,” says Mariela Castro Flores, an abortion activist in Mexico, where the Supreme Court decriminalized abortion last year. For women everywhere, she says, “it’s brutal.”

A constitutional guarantee?

The Dobbs decision has emboldened anti-abortion groups internationally but goes against global trends: Over the past three decades, only three other countries had tightened abortion access before the Dobbs decision – Nicaragua, El Salvador, and Poland – according to the Center for Reproductive Rights, while more than 60 had relaxed the rules. 

The American decision came in for harsh condemnation abroad; Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau called it “horrific,” while French President Emmanuel Macron tweeted, “Abortion is a fundamental right for all women. It must be protected.”

Just how to protect women’s rights, though, has proved a much more difficult question to answer.

In the U.S., President Joe Biden signed an executive order Friday to defend American women from what he called the “terrible, extreme, and, I think, so totally wrongheaded” ruling by the Supreme Court. The order directs Health and Human Services to identify ways to “protect and expand access to abortion care” and preserve patient privacy, among other measures. But he also urged Americans to vote as the “fastest way” to get a national law that would codify Roe. 

The French bid to enshrine abortion as a constitutional right aims to provide “a guarantee,” says Albane Gaillot, a former parliamentarian whose 2020 bill extended the legal limit for abortion from 12 to 14 weeks. “In France, we don’t have strong opposition to the ‘Veil Law,’” she adds. But if political groups “want to undo the law, they’ll do it incrementally. And that would be very simple. All they would need is a majority in parliament.” 

In Canada, abortion was decriminalized in 1988, but no legislation protects it. Instead, it is treated as a medical procedure. In the wake of Dobbs, many are now asking whether Canada should put more safeguards in place, says James Kelly, a political science professor at Concordia University in Quebec.

Chris Helgren/Reuters

People hold signs as they stand in front of the U.S. Consulate in Toronto during a protest after the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in the Dobbs v. Jackson Women's Health Organization case, overturning the landmark Roe v. Wade abortion decision, June 29, 2022.

But tinkering with the status quo could backfire for women, politicizing an issue that is not nearly the wedge it is south of the border. “In Canada we’ve had a consensus for nearly a generation that abortion is a medical service that should be provided at the discretion of the provinces,” Dr. Kelly says. “And none of the major political parties has wanted to revisit that consensus.”

In France, the moves to enshrine a constitutional protection could also risk polarizing the issue, says Anne-Marie Le Pourhiet, a public law professor at the University of Rennes 1. “Our traditions are not the same as in the U.S. If there is an ethical question to resolve, it’s the legislature that takes up the matter,” she says.  

“If you put abortion rights in the constitution, it gives the Constitutional Court a power it has never had before, and creates a government run by judges, which does not exist here,” Professor Le Pourhiet argues.

“There’s no point in going down the road of provocation,” she adds. “Simone Veil’s work was extremely balanced and resulted in consensus. ... Those who work in an extreme way create civil war.”

Some activists, though, not only support the constitutional change in France but also want even more encompassing protection. The “Abortion in Europe, Women Decide” collective, for example, is calling for abortion rights to be incorporated into the European Union’s Charter of Fundamental Rights. That is partly a reaction to new restrictions on abortion rights in EU-member Poland, showing how tenuous women’s rights can be.

Jean-Francois Badias/AP

European lawmakers gather to vote at the European Parliament, July 6, 2022, in Strasbourg, France. The parliament overwhelmingly condemned the end of constitutional protections for abortions in the United States and called for such safeguards to be enshrined in the EU's Charter of Fundamental Rights.

At the Paris protest, says Danielle Gaudry, a member of the collective, young people filled the streets. “The younger they are, the angrier they are. They never thought that a law could be called into question in a country like the United States – a country that the world looks to. It was really a wake-up call,” she says.  

Cross-border payback

Perhaps no activists are feeling the pressure of the Dobbs decision more than those on the U.S.-Mexico border.

Mexico’s Supreme Court decriminalized abortion the same month that Texas went further than any other U.S. state to restrict it, enacting a law banning abortion after six weeks. The nearly simultaneous decisions began to reverse a decadeslong trend of Mexican women crossing the border into the United States to have abortions.

Feminist groups and abortion-rights activists in Mexico, who for years have been promoting medicated abortions and education about clandestine but safe termination of pregnancies, are now supporting their counterparts in the United States, providing assistance in Mexico for anyone who may need to cross the border to have an abortion, whether through medication or in a clinic.  

In recent weeks, activist groups have started coordinating with U.S. networks to bring medications across the border too, according to Ms. Castro Flores. She declined to give details, but news reports cite smuggling the medication in teddy bears and other covert measures.

Latin America is considered one of the most restrictive regions in the world for abortion access. But as the U.S. is restricting rights, the region has shown a clear trend toward expanding them, from Argentina to Colombia.

Fernando Llano/AP

An abortion-rights advocate places a sign with a message that reads in Spanish "Legal abortion now" on a gate in front of the U.S. Embassy during a protest in Mexico City, June 29, 2022.

That has not only removed stigmas attached to the termination of pregnancies, but also shifted some entrenched gender inequalities. Ana Luis Muñoz, a Mexican psychologist, founded a program specifically for fathers called Padres muy Padres (Very Cool Dads) to encourage men to get more involved in traditionally “female” realms of parenting like child care and housekeeping. She says younger generations are more accepting of abortion, in large part because of the question of equality.

“Youth who are seeing their fathers participate more in raising them are more understanding of the idea of partnership. There’s more space to discuss abortion – or even just more understanding of the responsibility of both partners to take precautions,” to approach family planning in a way that takes both a man’s and a woman’s hopes and plans into account in a relationship, she says.

Back in Paris at last weekend’s protest, Mathieu Logothetis, a teacher and union activist, agrees that men have a role to play. “I think it’s generally important for men to be part of this debate so that media and politicians don’t relegate abortion to a ‘woman’s issue,’” he says. “That unfortunately often means it is given less importance.” 

Abortion, yes; sex selection, no

If a driving motivation for Americans opposed to abortion, especially conservative Christians, is protection of the unborn child, Judaism considers access to abortion as fundamental – to protect the life of the mother. 

In Israel, abortion has been a right since 1977, a law undergirded by the religious precepts of the country’s two dominant faiths with respect to when a fetus is actually considered “alive” – 40 days in Judaism and 120 days in Islam.

“The fact that until 40 days it’s not considered a live fetus makes the conversation much easier,” says Prof. Gil Siegal, an expert on health law and bioethics at Ono Academic College outside Tel Aviv. “Israeli society understands … a woman’s freedom of choice.”

That means abortion care is more straightforward in Israel than in even the most liberal U.S. states, argues Sarah Tuttle-Singer, an Israeli American journalist and editor in Jerusalem. It is “a lot more matter-of-fact, more compassionate, and with less of a stigma attached to it, even by religious people and religious doctors here,” she says.

The health ministry just removed bureaucratic hurdles to abortion that were deemed overly invasive, including the need for women to appear physically before an expert review committee. The reform was part of a long-term plan, but coming on the heels of the Dobbs decision, it drew attention to Israel’s more liberal approach; the left-leaning health minister, Nitzan Horowitz, tweeted, “The United States has moved backwards, Israel is moving forward.”

India is watching the U.S. closely too, but it strikes a careful balance between ensuring access to abortion and preserving female equality. Abortion has been permitted by law since 1971, largely to lower the high rate of deaths in childbirth. An amendment in 2021 liberalized the law further.

But India also contends with sex selection, whereby women abort female fetuses in favor of males, even though the practice is illegal. The United Nations estimates 3% of all female fetuses are aborted each year.

To ensure women’s access to safe abortion while not allowing male preference to flourish, Vinoj Manning, CEO of the Indian nonprofit IPAS Development Foundation, says his organization advocates abortion early in the pregnancy, before a fetus’s sex can be determined by ultrasound. 

Still, abortion access is critical, and the recent U.S. Supreme Court decision ending the right to abortion makes that fight more urgent, in India and beyond, he says.

“Anything around abortion, any gains we have made, are always fragile,” Mr. Manning warns. “What happened in the U.S. sets a bad precedent. It makes a bad thing seem fine.”

The assassination of Japan’s former prime minister Abe Shinzo while campaigning for a local politician in Nara has shocked a country rarely exposed to political violence. But even as leaders have said that parliamentary elections will be held as planned on Sunday, the searing loss of the country’s longest-serving prime minister – still a force in national politics – is raising uncomfortable questions around everything from security to social stability.

In the wake of the assassination, by a former navy member who had a homemade gun, Japanese streamed to the site near Yamato-Saidaiji Station, putting their hands together in prayer and bowing deeply. Others placed flowers and candles to honor the fallen leader. Memorials have filled social media, while TV programs have provided wall-to-wall coverage.

Tributes have poured in from leaders around the world, underscoring the global profile that Mr. Abe cut during his eight years in office. In India, a local tweeted a picture of his “humble tribute” to Mr. Abe, a sand art portrait created at Puri Beach with the words “we will miss you.” Many Taiwanese, meanwhile, offered their gratitude for his strong support of them. Queen Elizabeth shared her “fond memories” of his visit to the United Kingdom in 2016, while Prince William honored the former leader’s “warmth and generosity” during a 2015 visit to Japan.

If there was a common factor among Japanese, it was a deepening sense of unease.

“It’s really eerie as [the assassination] appears to portend the advent of a sinister time,” Tanaka Ryusaku, a freelance journalist, posted on his website. 

Kogumasaka Takashi, a city councilor from Mr. Abe’s Liberal Democratic Party in the western city of Shimonoseki in Yamaguchi prefecture, says residents have been unsettled by Mr. Abe’s assassination. Mr. Abe was scheduled to travel there on Monday.

Bruno Kelly/Reuters/File

Japanese Prime Minister Abe Shinzo visits the Japan House to greet his country's Olympic athletes and delegates in Rio de Janeiro, Aug. 21, 2016. Mr. Abe was the primary driver behind holding the Olympics in Tokyo in 2021, despite the pandemic.

“Locals were very much looking forward to his visit,” he says. “He was very friendly and approachable to anyone.”

Mr. Kogumasaka vividly recalls Mr. Abe’s visit to the city in 2007, shortly after he recovered from an illness that interrupted his one-year stint as prime minister. “Mr. Abe was talking to local residents in a gracious manner,” he says, adding emphatically that the death of Mr. Abe, whose second term stretched from 2012 to 2020, is “a huge loss to Japan and locals.”

A rare shooting

Shooting incidents are rare in Japan, which has some of the world’s strictest gun laws. The estimated total number of guns possessed by civilians in Japan was 310,400 in 2019, or 0.25 per 100 people, compared with 393 million guns, or 120 per 100 people, in the United States, according to GunPolicy.org. And of the eight gun-related homicides in Japan in 2020, seven were caused by yakuza gangsters, according to the National Police Agency. The last political assassination to make headlines was in 2007, when Nagasaki Mayor Ito Iccho was shot by a gangster while campaigning for his reelection.

About a minute into his stump speech on Friday, Mr. Abe was shot twice by Japanese navy veteran Yamagami Tetsuya, according to local reports. Authorities arrested the gunman on the scene, and say he confessed to the killing shortly after, claiming he was “frustrated with the former prime minister.”

The assassination will likely prompt Japan to increase security at political events, which has historically been quite modest. Indeed, video showed Mr. Abe speaking informally near the train station as residents stood close by and others wheeled by on bicycles. 

“I could not believe this,” says a Shimonoseki resident who declined to be named. “This is a huge incident. I wonder what will become of Japan and what will become of Yamaguchi,” the area where Mr. Abe was scheduled to visit.

“I feel nothing but sympathy for his wife,” she adds, referring to Abe Akie.

Meanwhile, Prime Minister Kishida Fumio, who had been mentored by Mr. Abe, fought back tears as he spoke to reporters at his office in Tokyo following the confirmation of Mr. Abe’s death. The “barbaric act that took the life of former Prime Minister Abe during an election campaign, which serves as a base for democracy, should never be tolerated.”

“I don’t even have any words as I’m filled with sorrow,” he added.

Tokyo-based journalist and author Hayashi Masaaki said the images of the fallen leader powerfully affected people. For him, the first step in responding was for candidates to keep campaigning.

Abe’s legacy

Mr. Abe’s tenure was one of pushing Japan to adopt a higher profile on numerous issues, from playing a greater security role on the global stage to boosting a long-stagnant economy.

In 2015, he successfully backed legislation to allow overseas combat missions in support of allies, despite enormous public protest. He also was the first prime minister to host an American president, Barack Obama, at Hiroshima, where the U.S. first dropped an atomic bomb. 

Under Mr. Abe, Japan signed major trade pacts with the United States and the European Union and completed the Trans-Pacific Partnership Agreement with 10 other Pacific Rim countries, even after the U.S. withdrew. After Mr. Abe took office, Japan’s benchmark Nikkei 225 Stock Average more than doubled, thanks to monetary easing measures by the Bank of Japan, the policy that he strongly supported.

But Mr. Abe faced his share of failures and controversy as well. He never achieved his longtime goal of revising Japan’s postwar constitution to get rid of Article 9, which renounced war. His “womenomics” campaign, which aimed to sharply increase women’s participation in the workforce, also fell short. He was met with international protest with his visit to the Yasukuni Shrine in 2013, which commemorates Japan’s 2.46 million war dead, including several convicted war criminals. Relations with South Korea were deeply strained. The Japanese public also took a dim view of his commitment to holding the Tokyo Olympics amid the coronavirus pandemic.

But larger issues of democracy and stability were on the minds of many in Japan as they absorbed their former leader’s killing.

The Japan Times editorialized that “this was an act of terrorism and there is no place for such behavior in Japan. We live in a democracy where disputes and differences are resolved by voting in elections, not with violence.”

U.S. President Joe Biden echoed the importance of Japan’s and America’s shared commitment to democracy. He described Mr. Abe as “a champion of the Alliance between our nations and the friendship between our people.” 

“Above all, he cared deeply about the Japanese people and dedicated his life to their service,” he said in a statement. “Even at the moment he was attacked, he was engaged in the work of democracy.”

Tom Brenner/Reuters

U.S. President Joe Biden delivers remarks on the South Lawn of the White House, July 4, 2022. He made promises in 2020 for bipartisanship but is under pressure from both Republicans and Democrats.

It was hard to escape the impression of an aging rock star returning for one last gig – appropriate, in a way, since the headline act, former British Prime Minister Tony Blair, was something of a wannabe guitarist in his youth.

But the conference Mr. Blair convened in London last week was about politics, not pop music.

Once the poster boy for “third way” politics, steering between the extremes, he is arguing that there is a renewed need for those in the center ground of politics to claw back voter affection from populists and ideologues on both left and right.

His message is rooted in a mix of political values – notably cooperation and compromise – and a hard-nosed acceptance of the policy spadework it will take to put those values into practice.

And it’s a message relevant to the future of democratic governance in Britain and beyond: most urgently in the United States, but also in European countries and in America’s major Middle East ally, Israel.

In all of these places, gladiatorial partisan politics are corroding democracies at a time when the issues governments are facing are too complex, and too politically fraught, to be resolved by any one side’s slogans, rhetorical flourishes, or easy promises. That will require developing and implementing new, forward-looking policies equal to those challenges.

Will that happen? The current political climate suggests it’s a long shot.

Christophe Petit Tesson/AP

French President Emmanuel Macron and Prime Minister Élisabeth Borne arrive for the first Cabinet meeting with new ministers at the Élysée Palace in Paris, July 4, 2022. Mr. Macron rearranged his Cabinet following legislative elections in which his centrist alliance failed to win a majority in Parliament.

But the struggle is underway, and it is reaching a decisive point in a number of democracies – perhaps nowhere as dramatically as in the United States.

President Joe Biden took office determined to achieve what Mr. Blair is urging, after four years of ideologically charged rule by Donald Trump which had magnified America’s divisions.

Mr. Biden vowed a bipartisan effort to tackle big issues affecting the lives of all Americans: rebounding from the pandemic, fixing a creaking national infrastructure, tackling climate change by building a greener economy, addressing inequalities in employment, health, and social care.

Yet he’s been stymied. He’s under pressure from both sides: from a Republican party still dominated by Mr. Trump, and from Democratic politicians on the left who dismiss his efforts at coalition-building as weak and naive.

In Europe, Mr. Blair’s bid for what he calls a “resurgent, radical” center also faces headwinds.

Not because of problems building coalitions, which is far less controversial in European countries than in hyperpartisan America.

The tougher task will be agreeing to a detailed policy vision to avert the long-term threats to a stable and sustainable future.

French President Emmanuel Macron, for example, will likely find immediate political imperatives getting in the way of that. A centrist, he won reelection earlier this year, but he no longer has an absolute majority in parliament, which means his government will have to rely on left-wing and right-wing foes, on a law-by-law basis, to get legislation passed.

In Britain, with Conservative leader Boris Johnson finally resigning and reduced to  caretaker status until his disgruntled party chooses a successor in the fall, the leader of the Labour Party, Keir Starmer, shares Mr. Blair’s view that he is still going to need to attract disenchanted Conservatives if Labour is to win the next election.

Jessica Taylor/UK Parliament/AP

Britain's Prime Minister Boris Johnson speaks in the House of Commons in London, July 6, 2022, a day when he maintained a tenuous hold on his job as a number of ministers in his government ended their support and resigned.

But his immediate priority has been to restore his party’s credibility. He has had no time to work on the kind of policy agenda Mr. Blair envisages: building a new relationship with Europe in the wake of Brexit; investing in nuclear-power stations and other measures to build a green economy; expanding the use of technology and AI to modernize an overstretched national health service.

Still, the most telling test of whether a centrist rebound is realistic may be Israel.

There, in a break from years of angry stalemate under Trump-allied Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, a new ruling coalition took power a year ago.

Its chief architect was center-left leader Yair Lapid. But he included a smaller, far-right party, and agreed that its leader, Naftali Bennett, would be prime minister for the first two years. And for the first time in Israel’s history, it included a party representing Arab Israelis, who make up some 20% of the country’s population.

The government’s first achievement was to survive Mr. Netanyahu’s attacks as a haven for “terrorists.” But it also passed a state budget for the first time in several years. It began addressing underinvestment in Israel’s Arab communities. And it demonstrated that Israelis of very different backgrounds and ideologies could work together in common cause.

But it has now lost its wafer thin parliamentary majority. Mr. Lapid has replaced Mr. Bennett as caretaker prime minister and called new elections for November.

Mr. Netanyahu is set on winning back power, and polls suggest he may well succeed. Mr. Lapid’s hope will be to convince voters that the compromise and cooperation his coalition embodied were much more than just an improvement on familiar zero-sum political bickering.

In fact, Mr. Lapid needs to make it clear, they are nothing less than essential to addressing the long-term challenges that his and other democracies face.

A 13-year-old Guatemalan was on his way to reunite with his father in the United States. A pair of 16-year-old cousins from Mexico were looking forward to steady work. Two young Hondurans promised their mother the journey would set them up to build her a home one day.

Instead, these youths – along with dozens of adults – perished in an abandoned, sweltering tractor-trailer in San Antonio last week, dubbed the deadliest human-smuggling incident in modern U.S. history.

The tragedy underscores the growing risks migrants face in trying to reach the U.S., but for many, it also raises a perennial question about unaccompanied minors: Why would a parent let their child go alone on such a life-threatening journey? 

“For people in the U.S. – or wherever they are in the world – the question isn’t ‘How could you do that?’ but needs to be ‘What has to happen to you that you’re willing to give up everything?’” says Elizabeth Kennedy, a Honduras-based social scientist who wrote a groundbreaking 2014 report about minors who migrate alone.

Nearly 123,000 unaccompanied minors apprehended on the U.S.-Mexico border were referred to the Office of Refugee Resettlement in fiscal year 2021. That’s a record number and more than double the arrivals during the so-called unaccompanied-migrant crisis in 2014.

Not unlike adults and families seeking refuge in the U.S., children and teens embark on the often deadly path north to escape poverty, violence, lack of opportunity, climate change, and abuse – or to reunite with loved ones. Where U.S. onlookers may see a lack of parental responsibility, for many parents, confronting the life-threatening risks of migration in order to find safety or opportunity elsewhere is a defining moment of duty and compassion. 

Jair Cabrera Torres/picture-alliance/dpa/AP/File

Young migrants, mostly from Honduras, line up for donations from nongovernmental organizations on Dec. 14, 2021, in Mexico City. They are waiting in a makeshift migrant camp for permission to continue toward the U.S. border.

“If our kids leave, it’s not because we don’t love them,” says Concepción Rosario Mercado de Alvarenga, who over the past seven years watched her three children trickle out of El Salvador to migrate to the U.S. She says her decision to let them go came from a place of hope for a better life. 

Eight years after her initial study was published, Ms. Kennedy says “nothing has been fixed” for families in Honduras, Guatemala, and El Salvador. In some cases, the situation around hunger, violence, and government corruption has gotten tangibly worse. 

“Once you talk to a Salvadoran or Honduran parent,” she says, “you come to the conclusion: Why would you not” let your child migrate to the U.S.?

A family’s hope

The Biden administration has pledged to address the root causes of migration, in June announcing $3.2 billion in private-sector investment in Central America to spur employment. And at the Summit of the Americas last month, the U.S. and Canada committed to taking more guest laborers from the region, creating legal pathways north. But pledges like these don’t resonate with would-be migrants, who often don’t have the time to wait for big promises to become realities. 

In the case of Karen Italia Caballero, the mother of two young men from Honduras who suffocated in the tractor-trailer June 27, the family discussed their departure together. In fact, Ms. Caballero traveled to Guatemala with them in early June before they carried on with a human smuggler. 

Her kids couldn’t find work, and the family was struggling to make ends meet. “We all planned it together, so that they could have a different life, so they could achieve their goals and dreams,” she told Telemundo in an interview at her home in western Honduras. 

“I hope you triumph,” she recalled telling her boys before they parted ways.  

So far, four people face charges in connection to the deaths of 53 migrants in the tractor-trailer.

Felix Marquez/AP

Residents hold a candlelight vigil to pray that three local teenagers, two brothers and a cousin, are not among the 53 migrants who died in an abandoned trailer in Texas, in San Marcos Atexquilapan, Mexico, June 30, 2022. One of the three teens, Misael, was later confirmed to have died in the trailer, while the fate of brothers Jair and Yovani remained unknown.

As border policies tighten, reliance on unscrupulous human smugglers grows. But these journeys north don’t always end in tragedy – for many, that’s the kernel of hope that motivates many migrants to take on the outsize risks – and they don’t always begin with a parent’s input.

For Jessica, a mother of four outside San Pedro Sula, Honduras, who asked to use only her first name for her family’s safety, she wasn’t given a say in her 17-year-old son’s departure for the U.S. last year. One winter evening, he mentioned he planned to leave with a group of friends. She told him no, “don’t go,” she recalls. 

But her son had been talking about the need to go north ever since back-to-back hurricanes destroyed their home in November 2020, burying all their belongings under more than two feet of mud. It was the only path he could envision out of poverty for his family, and away from ever-present gang violence that chases so many young men like himself.

The day after Jessica told him it was a bad idea, she realized he was never asking permission: He’d already left.  

“It’s not always up to the parent. Often these are decisions made by the child, who is frequently a teenager,” Mark Greenberg, former acting assistant secretary for the Administration for Children and Families, with responsibilities for unaccompanied child migrants under the Obama administration, told the Monitor last year. In the past decade, the number of unaccompanied minors arriving at the U.S. border has ballooned from 7,000 in 2011 to 122,731 in 2021.

Despite feeling panicked in the minutes or hours between texting her son at the start of his journey, Jessica says she came to realize there’s a trade-off to her worries. 

“Living in Honduras is the most fear you can have,” she says. “It’s not that I sleep that well. But I sleep a little better, because at least I know someone won’t knock on my door and say, ‘The gangs killed your son.’” 

Dwindling choices

The pandemic has made life even more challenging for youths in the region. Many lost parents or caregivers to COVID-19, becoming de facto breadwinners for their families in countries already facing high unemployment and low wages. Children in Latin America have on average been out of school longer than kids in any part of the world according to UNICEF, and the longer kids are away from the classroom, the less likely they are to return. The loss of hope in a future at home drives many to seek opportunity elsewhere.

Early in the pandemic, a group of kids ranging in age from 11 to 17 sat at folding tables in the sparsely decorated cafeteria inside the Casa Mambré refugee shelter in Mexico City. The Guatemalan, Honduran, and Salvadoran children were stopped by Mexican officials en route to the U.S., and now had to decide whether to apply for asylum in Mexico or return home – possibly to start the journey north again from scratch.

Jose Torres/Reuters

Migrants walk in a caravan after growing impatient waiting for a humanitarian visa to cross the country to reach the U.S. border, in Tapachula, Mexico, July 1, 2022.

Few in the group of mostly young boys had discussed the voyage with an adult before taking off. Oscar, a 17-year-old from Guatemala, left his 5-year-old brother and parents behind almost two months prior. He says his family opposed the idea, asking him repeatedly to consider other options in Guatemala – like looking for work in the capital. But he could see his dead-end future at home, and wanted to take financial responsibility for himself and his loved ones. 

“There’s nothing for me” in Guatemala, Oscar says. “No school, no work, no life.” 

“So many of these kids are born into violence,” says Eréndira Barco, a social worker at Casa Mambré. “The moment they decide to take this journey, they are prepared for it in a really unfortunate way.” 

She sees an element of resilience in the unaccompanied minors that pass through the shelter, and a maturity that comes at the cost of “not living a childhood” in their home country. “They don’t play, they can’t go into the streets because of gangs and violence,” she says. “Often, they can’t even go to school.”

Unimaginable decision

It’s hard for the average American to understand “the desperation these individuals have” in migrating or watching their child decide to migrate alone, says Essey Workie, director of the human services initiative at the Migration Policy Institute. 

“We certainly have poverty and challenges in the U.S., but they pale in comparison to the level of deep poverty and safety issues” in Central America and parts of Mexico, she says. “When someone witnesses a family member or community member raped or killed in front of their eyes and then is threatened directly that they’re next? There’s no choice left but to flee.”

Bertha, a Honduran mother who asked to use only her first name, knows that feeling. When her family started getting threatening phone calls nearly a decade after her environmental activist husband’s unsolved killing, she took the danger seriously. 

She felt “great pain” telling her 16-year-old son to go ahead and try his hand at reaching the U.S. 

“I thought no and yes at the same time,” she says. “I was confused about everything.” She didn’t eat or sleep while waiting for news of his safe arrival. Eventually, he was deported home from Mexico.

“If parents were irresponsible, they wouldn’t search for options so that their kids could survive and get ahead in life,” Bertha’s son says about his mother’s decision to let him leave. “I consider it an act of wanting to protect my life. I faced a risk here and on the journey, but she knew that I had better opportunities” beyond Honduras.

Bertha says if a parent has the means to keep their child safe at home with them, that’s obviously the best choice. But it’s not always possible.

“For your kids, you’ll endure anything,” she says. “For the good of your kids, you are willing to make any sacrifice.”

AP

Police inspect ballot papers to be used in the Aug. 9 election after they arrived at the airport in Nairobi July 7.

If all goes well in Kenya’s Aug. 9 presidential election, it will result in a rare occurrence in Africa: the second consecutive peaceful transfer of power after a fair vote. That hope is why observers are worried about recent political skirmishes in a few cities. One survey calculates a 53% risk of election-related violence.

Yet other signs suggest a different outcome. Past outbreaks of political violence, especially after the 2007 election, are not forgotten in one of Africa’s strongest democracies. “Kenyans still have a strong desire to have a peaceful election,” finds the National Cohesion and Integration Commission.

That view reflects more than simply violence fatigue. It underscores how democratic norms have matured since Kenya adopted a new constitution in 2010. The two main presidential candidates, Raila Odinga and Vice President William Ruto, have been quick to condemn acts of political violence. Such acts, says Mr. Ruto, are divisive and tear down democracy.

Such comments represent a break from the past when candidates often stirred up conflict between rival ethnic groups for electoral gain. Those rivalries have not gone away. Mr. Odinga represents Kenya’s second-largest ethnic group, the Luos, who have never had a candidate win the presidency. Dr. Ruto is a Kalenjin, a small group that held power for 24 years. But the coming election may reveal a deepening respect for constitutional norms and a national civic identity.

The country’s Supreme Court has helped. In 2017, it took a bold step to annul the presidential election over ballot irregularities, sending a signal about rule of law. In March the court flexed its muscle again when it rejected a constitutional amendment proposed by outgoing President Uhuru Kenyatta that would have enabled him to remain powerful in a new role. That sort of constitutional mischief is common in Africa.

This election will be Kenya’s third under the 2010 constitution with signs that voters are eager to hold elected officials at all levels to account.

In one of the most troubled regions in Africa, challenged by drought, civil war, and Islamist extremism, Kenya is showing how democracy can take hold when society embraces a higher identity of citizenship, one based on equality and rule of law.