These women say their babies were stillborn. Courts convicted them of homicide in a country with harsh abortion laws
By Catherine E. Shoichet, CNN
Published 4:00 AM EDT, Sun October 8, 2023
….It’s been 25 years since El Salvador made abortion illegal in all circumstances, eliminating any exceptions. And it’s been nearly as long since lawmakers passed a constitutional amendment declaring that life begins at conception.
Teodora Vásquez was among more than 180 women who advocates say were unjustly convicted of crimes after suffering obstetric emergencies, including miscarriages and stillbirths, in the years since the revised penal code and constitutional amendment went into effect. Activists warn that these women’s experiences show how dangerously far criminalizing abortion can go….
Vásquez’s case and others like it caught the attention of Jocelyn Viterna, a professor of sociology and chair of Studies of Women, Gender and Sexuality at Harvard University who has spent decades studying the impact of abortion restrictions in El Salvador.
“Once you start looking into these cases, the extreme injustice jumps off the page,” Viterna says. “These women had not done anything to break the law, and yet at every step the legal system was set up to prosecute them.”