El Salvador sentences a young woman to 50 years in prison after suffering an abortion

• María Teresa Rivera First asylum case in the world for abortion: "El Salvador protects the rapist and imprisons the victims"

The Justice of

has applied the highest penalty to a 21-year-old girl after suffering an abortion by sentencing her to 50 years in prison.

Her "crime" was to suffer an obstetric emergency when she was 19 years old, which caused her to lose her baby, although a

judge convicted her on June 29 of aggravated homicide, when she was initially prosecuted for abortion .

In this way, it has been the first time that the Salvadoran justice has sentenced a woman to the maximum prison sentence for having an abortion.

This sentence has provoked the rejection of women's organizations in the Central American country, which have already announced that they will

because "it reflects the cruelty of the Prosecutor's Office against impoverished women who face health emergencies during their pregnancy." .

According to the

, the convicted young woman comes from a very humble family in eastern El Salvador that survives from agricultural work.

Thus, he revealed that Lesli "did not have access to quality education, since she had to take on household chores and take care of her four minor siblings", given that her family lives in a "situation of extreme poverty, does not have access to water drinking water or electricity and does not have decent housing".

Thus, he indicated that the young woman, at 19 years old and without having received comprehensive sexuality education, "was unaware of what was happening in her body", so on June 17, 2020 at 9:30 p.m.,

, felt like defecating and unknowingly went into labor".

In this way, the aforementioned entity details that she "went to the latrine and at that moment she had a precipitous delivery expelling the unborn child".

In this way, she went looking for help from her relatives, while the neighbors called the police who took her to the hospital and "there began her journey from the hospital to the jail."

The first hearing took place on June 26, 2020, although, according to the aforementioned Group,

could not be present due to the "deterioration in her health due to the obstetric emergency, since she had received three blood transfusions ".

However, at that hearing, the judge ordered a formal investigation with provisional detention.

In this sense, the Citizen Group for the Decriminalization of Abortion denounces that the legal process against the young woman was

, which is why her defense requested to annul the investigation stage because the judge "did not admit the incorporation of evidence that demonstrated her innocence, given that it did not value the social expert opinion of Forensic Medicine that evidences the gender violence to which Lesli had been subjected, nor the psychological expert opinion that suggested conducting a psychiatric study.

Despite all these "gaps and doubts", the Group denounces that the judge sentenced her to 50 years in prison, the highest sentence that has been applied in the history of El Salvador to a woman after suffering an obstetric emergency.

In addition, he criticizes that the magistrate based his decision on "mere gender prejudices" having stated that "mothers are the source of protection for children in any circumstance of life and you were not."

On the other hand, he considers that this sentence is contrary to the recent ruling in the

in which the State of El Salvador was condemned and was required "not to persecute and criminalize women who face obstetric emergencies."

"SAD STORY" OF EL SALVADOR

The President of the Citizen Group,

, has condemned the ruling and has announced that they will continue fighting "until no woman who faces health emergencies during pregnancy is criminalized."

Along these lines, he lamented that, despite attempts to close the page on the "sad history" of El Salvador that "unfairly" condemns impoverished women due to obstetric emergencies, the Salvadoran State "continues, once again, raging against women who have not had the rights or the conditions to defend themselves".

However, she has warned that, despite these "penalizing intentions, we are going to change this reality, because we are capable of imagining a fairer world."

In August 2021, the President of El Salvador,

closed the door on introducing therapeutic abortion in a package of constitutional reforms.

"You have known me for years and you know that I would not propose those things, no matter how much international pressure I have," the president said on social media.

Thus, he wanted to make it clear that he has decided "so that there is no doubt, not to propose any type of reform to any article that has to do with the right to life (from the moment of conception)".

In this way, Bukele yielded to pressure from the

, which opposed the changes in the Constitution proposed by a group of jurists led by the Vice President of the Government.

"As Christians, we are absolutely in favor of life, from conception to natural death," said the Episcopal Conference.

Specifically, the reform that was intended to be introduced referred to the "right to life of both the unborn and the pregnant woman", which meant de facto introducing the possibility of therapeutic abortion when the life of the mother was in danger.

Since 1998, abortion is prohibited in all cases,

, under a prison sentence of six to eight years, in the case of an abortion, which rises to between 30 and 40 years for a crime of aggravated homicide in the event that it is an out-of-hospital delivery that occurs when the pregnancy exceeds 20 weeks and even if it is accidental.

In recent years, the Salvadoran justice has been releasing some of the 17 women who were still in prison after being sentenced to up to 35 years in prison, although this is the first time that justice has increased the prison sentence to 50 years.

These releases, which have benefited

, have been possible thanks to the work of the aforementioned Citizen Group created more than a decade ago by a team of lawyers who were in charge of investigate how many women were sentenced after suffering an obstetric emergency.

The last to be released was Jacqueline, a young woman who spent ten years and nine months in prison accused of the crime of attempted murder for "wanting to have an abortion."

In principle, she was sentenced in December 2011 to 15 years in prison after facing an out-of-hospital delivery in July of that year and, despite the fact that her daughter survived, when she sought medical help for both of them, she was detained by police officers. .

For its part, the Inter-American Court of Human Rights (IACHR) condemned the State of El Salvador in December 2021 for the

, who was deprived of liberty, after trying to access reproductive health services in a public hospital when faced with an obstetric emergency.

Specifically, Manuela went to a public hospital in the Central American country in 2008 after suffering a miscarriage.

She was arrested there and transferred directly to prison after being reported by the medical personnel who treated her during the obstetric emergency.

Later, she was sentenced to 30 years in prison for the crime of homicide and in 2010 she died in prison from cancer, leaving her two children orphaned.

Despite this condemnation of the State of El Salvador, the country continues to criminalize women who suffer an obstetric emergency who have the Damocles sword of being able to end up in prison.

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