El Salvador has one of the toughest anti-abortion laws in the world. A side-effect is that women who suffer miscarriages are sometimes suspected of inducing an abortion - and can even be jailed for murder.
EL Salvador received plenty of international attention this summer for its strict ban on abortion, which led the government to deny an abortion to a woman who was near death and whose pregnancy had no chance in resulting in a live baby.
The government eventually allowed her to end her pregnancy, as long as it was performed in the maximally dangerous way through cesarean section, but that doesn’t mean that things are getting any better for women in El Salvador.
As the BBC reported on Thursday, one major side effect of the country’s anti-abortion law is that women are being jailed simply because their bodies failed to sustain a pregnancy.
Showing up at a public hospital with a miscarriage is risky business in El Salvador, because instead of medical care, you might find yourself being cuffed to the bed and accused of “murder.”
According to BBC reporter Nina Lakhani, 19-year-old Glenda Xiomara Cruz showed up at the public hospital near her home, “crippled by abdominal pain and heavy bleeding” in October 2012. “It was the first she knew about the pregnancy as her menstrual cycle was unbroken, her weight practically unchanged, and a pregnancy test in May 2012 had been negative,” Lakhani writes.
“Four days later she was charged with aggravated murderintentionally murdering the 38-to-42 week foetusat a court hearing she was too sick to attend. The hospital had reported her to the police for a suspected abortion.” Cruz was eventually moved to a women’s prison in San Salvador. Then, writes Lakhani, “last month she was sentenced to 10 years in jail, the judge ruling that she should have saved the baby’s life.”
So a woman shows up at the hospital seeking treatment for miscarriage and the hospital staff decides that she is faking and actually got an abortion. Cruz’s defense attorney, Dennis Munoz Estanley, has taken up the cause, representing 29 of the 49 women convicted of murder or abortion in 2011. Of his clients, he says, only one actually procured an abortion. The other 28 were women he claims had miscarriages and are railroaded by a criminal justice system that needs women to make examples of to prove it’s tough on abortion.
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