El Salvador: Women Face Imprisonment If They Miscarry

Imagine that  you are a woman in El Salvador and suffer a miscarriage, there is a chance that you may be jailed up to 50 years for aggravated homicide.

The Salvadoran law once permitted abortion in certain circumstances, but in 1998, a new abortion law was implemented, resulting in a total criminalisation concerning all causes.

The small Central American country has constantly been making headlines with women being treated like criminals, accused for having abortions, when in fact it was miscarriages caused by medical complications.

María Teresa Rivera is one of these women, a 28 year-old factory worker and with a five year-old son, she already lived a tough life in poverty surrounded by violence. Rivera was unaware of another pregnancy and suffered sudden pains, causing her to bleed on her bathroom floor.

It turned out that Rivera was having a miscarriage. She was taken to a public hospital to receive emergency help, but instead found herself reported by a member of staff to the police and sentenced 40 years in jail for aggravated murder.

Rivera did have a trial, but she had no proper defence and the court disregarded the fact that she was unaware of the pregnancy. She even met her publicly appointed lawyer right before the trial.

Rivera is now serving her 40 years sentence in an overcrowded prison and with several other women going through similar experiences, she is not alone.

El Salvador has the highest number of teen pregnancies in Latin America and, in a country where 42 per cent of women get pregnant under the age of 20, it demonstrates a lack of accessible sexual education for the majority of Salvadorans the living in poverty.

Christina Quintanilla was 17 years-old when she was seven months pregnant of her second child, and just like Rivera she suffered a miscarriage and was brought to hospital in critical conditions.

Required by Salvadoran law, the medical staff reported Quintanilla, just like Rivera, to the police, suspecting an abortion. She was sent straight to prison from the hospital and sentenced 30 years for aggravated homicide, but to her luck a lawyer came across her case and successfully argued that there was never an established causes of her baby’s death.

As seen with Quintanilla and Rivera’s case these are young vulnerable, poor women with little education. In June 2012 the feminist organisation La Agrupación Ciudadana por la Despenalización del Aborto (the Citizen Group for the Decriminalisation of Abortion) mentioned that the Salvadoran law had imprisoned 628 women for aggravated murder after having an abortion, miscarriage or a still birth.

In addition, not one of these reports was made from private hospitals, where the small elite can get proper medical care or travel abroad for it.

The consequences are that innocent women get treated and threatened in prison by real criminals, not only with mental but also physical abuse. Their families are left in an even more miserable situation than before, as in most cases these women where the breadwinners.

For women like Quintanilla, who was lucky enough to have her sentenced overturned, there is still that fear of having another complication if pregnant. Seeking medical help at a public hospital would be a risk, and she knows what her life could be turned into.

The Citizen Group are not only working on getting support and attention from Salvadorans but beyond to an international public. Their campaign is about educating people about the lives of the imprisoned women and the consequences of the laws, as well as about the structural injustices.

Salil Shetty, Secretary General of Amnesty International has spoken out, calling on the government of El Salvador to decriminalise abortion.

“The horrific repression that women and girls in El Salvador face is truly shocking and akin to torture. They are denied their fundamental right to make decisions about their own bodies and are severely punished if they dare to do so.

Shockingly, the ban extends even to cases where the life of the pregnant woman is at risk, meaning those too ill to safely carry a pregnancy to term face an impossible choice: trapped between potential jail if they have an abortion and a death sentence if they do nothing.”