I doubt our President has heard of Evelyn Hernández and know he would not do a damn thing for her even if he has. She is valued by her highly religious land for her ability to provide sexual outlet to men and to procreate, and, to the extent she rejects this paradigm, prison awaits. Her life under “the law” of her country of origin is inconsequential to him, if not exemplary. What then shall we in the US who care about humanity do? Are we able to even look southward and see the fact that oppressing those having female body parts is key to the pernicious evil of regimes like the one under which she is virtually enslaved?
It is particularly easy in Trumpian times to get lost in the strung-together reality TV moments our leader creates for us (www.nytimes.com/...). Even the act of empathy with the powerless can take on a superficial subservience to the need to respond to Trump’s latest major or trivial made-for-TV outrage. Meanwhile, in the real real world, the suffering of millions of human beings is partially rooted in timeless inequality we may fail to even notice.
In much of Latin America, including the so-called Northern Triangle countries experiencing the highest outflows of asylum seekers to the US, one huge and largely unacknowledged aspect of the baseline is the constant fear of governmental persecution of a particular social group: women (www.unhcr.org/...). As ancient ruling elites gave way to Spanish-speaking elites who variously retain power today, now ostensibly democratically, opportunistically in league with religious, transnational corporate, and narco gang lords, one constant has remained: the brutal subjugation of women.
It is easy to miss the fact that the desperate migrating women of the Northern Triangle are often acute victims of a timeless oppression that we should be observant of by now, one that is typically in tandem with oppression of LGBTQs. It is partially because of our own society’s ambivalence to women’s rights that the plights of Northern Triangle women also remain in the closet.
Being able to make our own decisions about our health, body and sexual life is a basic human right.
Whoever you are, wherever you live, you have the right to make these choices without fear, violence or discrimination.
Yet all over the world, people are bullied, discriminated against and arrested, simply for making choices about their bodies and their lives.
A woman is refused contraception because she doesn’t have her husband’s permission. A teenager is denied a life-saving termination because abortion is illegal in her country. A man is harassed by police because he’s gay.
(www.amnesty.org/...)
Women who stay behind in the Northern Triangle to be raped by gang members cannot look to their government to do anything but point the finger at, and if possible imprison, the victims.
Prosecutors in El Salvador have announced that they will appeal against last month’s acquittal of a young woman accused of killing her stillborn son, marking what would be her third trial in the socially conservative Central American country.
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Hernández, 21, said she was raped by a gang member and was unaware of her pregnancy until just before delivering a stillborn son in early 2016.
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Hernández was rushed to hospital after complications during the birth. Once there, medical staff accused her of attempting an illegal abortion and handed her over to authorities, her defense says.
(www.theguardian.com/...)
We need to build a wall around women’s bodies so that people like Trump keep their hands and laws off them.