Hopes born from the election of Nayib Bukele, in 2019, in matters of women’s rights did not materialize in a country where the Catholic Church enjoys an important seat.
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Thirty years in prison for losing his fetus. It was the penalty to which Esme (the first name was changed) was sentenced on Monday, May 9, when she called the emergencies and made a miscarriage. Far from receiving the necessary care, according to the citizen collective for the decriminalization of abortion, it was denounced to the police, and accused of homicide. The lawyer for Esme, Karla Vaquerano, announced that she would appeal to the court decision, assuring that the prosecution accusations were biased and tinged with gender stereotypes.
Salvador is one of the seven countries in the world (with Nicaragua, Honduras, the Dominican Republic, Haiti, Suriname and Malta) which completely prohibit abortion. A dozen women are currently behind bars following obstetric emergencies. We accuse them of having in reality wanted to put an end to their pregnancy. Their sorrows sometimes reach forty years, as in the case of Maria Teresa Rivera, who was able to flee from Sweden and obtain the asylum.
For seven years, there had been no new convictions. That of Esme is therefore the first to take place during the mandate of the young Head of State, Nayib Bukele, in power since 2019, and whose feminists expected a lot. The president had assured during his campaign to be favorable to the decriminalization of the interruption of pregnancy in the event of danger for the life of the pregnant woman.
The unwitting promises of Nayib Bukele
A promise not held. In September 2021, he announced that he had decided to withdraw from a proposal to reform the constitution therapeutic abortion and marriage between people of the same sex. The feminist collectives and LGBT had however been consulted by the ad hoc team responsible for writing the proposal for a constitutional reform. The country’s vice-president, Félix Ulloa, author of the text, had attributed the refusal of Nayib Bukele to the pressures of “very powerful conservative sectors, in particular the Catholic Church”. Regarding the convictions of women to heavy prison sentences, he recognized that Salvador was “a shame on this subject”.
In December 2021, in a gesture of appeasement, Nayib Bukele had ordered the release of three of the seventeen women sentenced to heavy sentences for aggravated homicide. In January then February, two other women had been released after spending ten years prison following a miscarriage.
“The condemnation of Esme (…) is a blow in [the fight] to end the criminalization of obstetric emergencies which, as the CIDH reported [Interamerician Court of Human Rights], must be treated as public health problems and women’s rights guarantee, “said Morena Herrera, president of the citizen collective.
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