Teodora del Carmen Vásquez was nine months pregnant and in excruciating pain. Unsure of what else to do, she grabbed a phone and called 911.
“A woman answered and said that she had made the request and help was on its way. But no one arrived to help me…I [called] at least five times,” she said.
Vásquez fainted before help arrived, bleeding profusely due to an obstetric emergency. After finally making it to the hospital, she was met several police officers who accused her of aggravated homicide while she recovered in her hospital bed.
Although Vásquez suffered from a miscarriage, the domestic worker was handcuffed and detained for having an “abortion” — a criminal act in El Salvador, which has some of the harshest anti-abortion laws in the world.
Vásquez was sentenced to 30 years in prison, a sentence that has torn apart her family and devastated her son who was three years old when his mother was sent to prison.
“When the boy visited the prison for the first time I told him outside the prison that he must be brave, and not cry, that he must be strong for her,” Vásquez’s mother, María, told researchers with Amnesty International who released a report on El Salvador’s draconian anti-abortion laws on Monday.
“When we left the prison, it was hard,” she recalled. “He clung to her. ‘Mummy, I’m taking you with me,’ he said to her. ‘Why don’t you turn into a dove and get out, and come with us? I don’t want to leave you here.’”
Vásquez already served eight years of her sentence. The prison she is in is a two day journey from her mother’s home, and her impoverished family can barely afford to send her son to visit. Many of the women who have been locked up for “aggravated homicide” were low-income workers who were unable to afford adequate legal council when charged, leaving their families to suffer doubly in their absence.
“Each time authorities in El Salvador unfairly lock up a woman for having a miscarriage or suffering pregnancy related complications, they are also condemning her children to a life of poverty and trauma,” Astrid Valencia of Amnesty International said.
Vásquez is one of at least 19 women in El Salvador who are serving harsh sentences for suffering obstetric complications during their pregnancies. In 1998, the Central American country criminalized abortion in all instances, including when a pregnancy results from rape or puts a woman’s life at risk. Women whose pregnancies end in miscarriage can be sentenced to 50 years in prison for committing “aggravated homicide” — the charge leveled at Vásquez.
The fear of harsh sentences has endangered the lives of women who are forced to carry risky pregnancies worried hey would be charged with attempting to commit murder if they seek medical care. The ban on abortion has made pregnancy to be one of the leading causes of suicide in El Salvador.
RELATED: El Salvador’s Total Abortion Ban Is Driving Pregnant Teens To Commit Suicide
“El Salvador´s ‘guilty until proven innocent’ approach when it comes to women who suffer pregnancy-related complications has cost scores of lives, landed women in prison for up to 40 years and created an environment of absolute fear amongst doctors and patients,” Valencia said. “It is high time for El Salvador to abolish this outdated ban.”
Amnesty International delivered a petition signed by more than 300,000 people to Salvadoran President President Sánchez Cerén in April. The petition called on the country’s lawmakers to ease the total abortion ban and improve women’s access to reproductive health care.
Despite the international outcry against El Salvador’s harsh anti-abortion laws, 38 states in the U.S. have similar measures that criminalize women for endangering their unborn children even though abortion is legal in most cases across the country. As ThinkProgress has reported, there are striking parallels between state laws against “fetal homicide” and the “aggravated homicide” provision in El Salvador.
In March, an Indiana woman named Purvi Patel became the first woman in the U.S. to convicted and sentenced for committing feticide. She was sentenced to 30 years in prison after she sought medical treatment for a miscarriage. Patel filed an appeal last month, although she has already begun to serve her sentence.
Unable to file for legal redress, Teodora del Carmen Vásquez has attempted to make the most of her tragic twist of fate in El Salvador. She is studying for a high school diploma. She told Amnesty International, “Every day I get up with a positive attitude, eager to learn something new.”
Still, she misses her family terribly. She used to celebrate her son’s birth with piñatas and music. The devoted mother would take her young son on a walk on his birthday, just the two of them.
Now, because of her country’s stringent laws against women who are thought to have attempted to shirk motherhood, she only gets to see him once a year.