El Salvador is one of just a handful of countries around the world where abortion is totally illegal, and where women can spend decades in prison if they’re convicted of attempting to end their pregnancies. Now, hundreds of thousands of people around the world are pressuring its political leaders to change that.
More than 300,000 people have signed onto a petition spearheaded by Amnesty International asking Salvadoran authorities to ease the total abortion ban and improve women’s access to reproductive health care. Erika Guevara-Rosas, the organization’s Americas Director, will deliver the signatures to the offices of El Salvador President Sánchez Cerén on Tuesday.
“For almost two decades women in El Salvador have suffered the consequences of this outdated, draconian law and now 300,000 voices from the global community join their struggle to stop the injustice. This is now a deafening chorus of concern that cannot be ignored. President Cerén must heed this call,” Guevara-Rosas said in a statement.
There’s plenty of evidence that El Salvador’s current abortion policy is placing women’s lives in jeopardy. Among teenage girls in the country, pregnancy is one of the leading causes of suicide because they’re well aware of their limited options.
Salvadoran women are also at risk of being jailed simply because of their ability to become pregnant. The total ban allows authorities to scrutinize women whose pregnancies end for natural reasons — charging them with murdering a family member even when the evidence suggests they actually had a miscarriage. Indeed, El Salvador has become infamous in the international community as one of the countries that’s most aggressively prosecuting women in this way. Between 1999 and 2011, there were 17 women — known as “Las 17” — who were sentenced to up to 40 years in prison for having miscarriages.
The El Salvadoran Legislative Assembly recently voted to grant a pardon to one of those women, but the rest remain imprisoned. Some them have died behind bars. A Salvadoran woman named Manuela, who was sentenced to 30 years in prison after she suffered complications while giving birth, ended up dying from cancer while she was incarcerated without being reunited with her two children.
The international human rights community recognizes reproductive rights as an integral aspect of reducing maternal mortality, and has been clear about the fact that countries should not ban abortion. Human rights experts and United Nations leaders have repeatedly urged El Salvador to change its repressive abortion law.
The pressure is intensifying. In addition to the hundreds of thousands of petition signatures being delivered this week, the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights — which is the main human rights body overseeing the Americas — also just issued a formal letter requesting the Salvadoran government to respond to recent charges of human rights violations related to women’s imprisonment under its current abortion ban. Considering the clout that Commission has in the region, the major critics of El Salvador’s law see this as a critical step.
“This is a vital breakthrough in bringing the government of El Salvador to account for the devastation it has brought about in the lives of countless women and families under its horrifically unjust abortion laws,” Mónica Arango, the regional director for Latin America and the Caribbean at the Center for Reproductive Rights, said in a statement.
This type of international pressure has successfully encouraged a global shift toward more liberal abortion laws. Over the past three decades, there’s been a clear trend toward making abortion more accessible around the world — ensuring that El Salvador is considerably out of step with current global human rights standards. Guevara-Rosas pointed out that El Salvador’s “cruel and discriminatory ban has no place in modern society.”
El Salvador isn’t the only country where women are jailed for suspected abortions or even miscarriages. Here in the United States, even though abortion is technically legal under Roe v. Wade, a growing number of state laws protecting “fetal rights” ensure that women can be charged with murder for allegedly harming their pregnancies.
Just last month, an Indiana woman named Purvi Patel was sentenced to 20 years in prison for what she says was a miscarriage; after she went to the emergency room to seek treatment for heavy bleeding, her nurses grew suspicious of her and called the police, who claim they found evidence to suggest she attempted to illegally end her pregnancy. Other women have faced similar charges for allegedly seeking to harm their fetuses by attempting suicide, using illicit drugs, or even falling down the stairs.