The country of El Salvador is sentencing woman who experience miscarriages or stillborn births up to 50 years in prison due to prosecutors who accuse women of causing the death of their fetus or infant.
El Salvador, along with neighboring Nicaragua and three other countries in Latin America, has the strictest abortion laws in the hemisphere. Virtually no exception is allowed for the termination of pregnancy - not for rape, incest, malformed fetus or danger to the woman's life. Yet the strict exception laws are taking to another extreme by imprisoning women who say the loss of their fetus or child was not their doing.
I can't imagine how a woman would prove she DID NOT cause the death of their fetus.
Salvadoran activists who have taken up the cause of Vasquez and other women have identified 17 similar cases and believe at least 15 more such prisoners languish in overcrowded Salvadoran prisons, alongside gangsters and murderers.
The Salvadoran Citizens' Coalition for the Decriminalization of Abortion offers even bleaker statistics: 129 women prosecuted between 2000 and 2011 for "abortion" crimes, 23 convicted for having received an illegal abortion and 26 convicted of homicide.
Activist Sara Garcia said Salvadoran laws disproportionately harm women who are poor and uneducated, but also reflect a general "hatred of women."
"We live in a misogynist, machista society … with prejudices about how a woman should behave and the punishment she should receive for not fulfilling those expectations," Garcia said. "There is no presumption of innocence."
International organizations including Amnesty International and the United Nations have asked El Salvador to relax its abortion laws, where doctors are also jailed for performing abortions. The World Health Organization estimates that more than 35,000 women in El Salvador obtain "back ally" unsafe, clandestine abortions each.
But of course, it is the Catholic Church who is responsible to a large degree for these laws as well:
The irony for some is that two countries with such strict laws, El Salvador and Nicaragua, are run by leftist governments.
In the case of Nicaragua, the explanation is rooted in political expediency. Sandinista leader Daniel Ortega, struggling to regain the presidency after a series of electoral defeats, needed Nicaragua's powerful Roman Catholic Church on his side. He struck a deal with erstwhile enemy Cardinal Miguel Obando y Bravo, the man who had vehemently opposed him when Ortega was a fiery revolutionary comandante in the 1970s and '80s.
With the church's help, Ortega won the presidency in late 2006, was inaugurated in January 2007, and a year later, a congress controlled by Ortega strengthened Nicaragua's 100-year-old abortion law to make the procedure illegal in all cases.
In El Salvador, the abortion ban dates to the two-decade reign of the conservative Arena party. In 1998, when the country had only recently emerged from a devastating civil war, conservative sectors of the Catholic Church, including the ultra-right-wing Opus Dei, campaigned successfully for a change in the constitution that declared life began with conception.
Here is the link to the article published this morning my the Los Angeles Times:
http://www.latimes.com/...
