El Salvador Still Persecuting Women Suffering Stillbirths

An El Salvador court has rejected the appeal of a woman sentenced to 30 years in prison over what she says was a stillbirth.

Teodora del Carmen Vásquez, 37, said she was working in 2007 when she began to experience intense pain, then bleeding. She called for help before fainting. As she came round, police officers surrounded her and accused her of murdering her baby by inducing an abortion of her nearly full-term baby.  Authorities charged Vásquez with aggravated murder and she was convicted in 2008. Her attorneys appealed her sentence, presenting testimony that the baby was born dead.  The court said it relied on the government autopsy’s conclusion that the girl was born alive and asphyxiated.

The non-profit Center for Reproductive Rights, which has been campaigning for the release of dozens of other women convicted of murder in El Salvador for obstetric emergencies, said the decision was “another slap in the face for Teodora, who never committed any crime”.  Teodora’s tragic story is a sad illustration of everything that is wrong with the justice system in El Salvador, where human rights seem to be a foreign concept,” said Erika Guevara-Rosas, Amnesty’s Americas director.  “Instead of punishing Teodora for being a woman, authorities in El Salvador must urgently take a hard look at their outrageous anti-abortion law and take immediate steps to repeal it.”

El Salvador is one of a handful of Latin American countries with total bans on abortion.  A glimmer of hope that El Salvador could overturn its abortion ban emerged earlier this year with the introduction of a parliamentary bill that proposed allowing abortion in cases of rape or human trafficking, when the foetus in unviable or to protect the pregnant woman’s health or life. Recently, activists took to the streets to protest the absolute ban.

In August, Chile voted to overturn its complete ban to allow abortion in certain circumstances.  Last week, Bolivia loosened its laws to allow girls and young women to access abortion services up to eight weeks into pregnancy. Prior to the change in new legislation, abortion was only available to women if their lives were in danger.