El Salvador's absolute ban on abortion criminalizes women who suffer natural obstetric complications
After seeking emergency medical attention for the sudden onset of abdominal cramps and heavy bleeding, a 19-year-old woman in Puerto El Triunfo, El Salvador, learned she had miscarried before she knew she was pregnant.
As reported by BBC News' Nina Lakhani, Glenda Xiomara Cruz had been getting regular periods and a pregnancy test from a few months earlier had been negative, but none of this stopped the hospital from reporting her to the police under the suspicion of inducing an abortion — a crime in El Salvador.
Xiomara underwent two emergency operations and spent three weeks in the hospital before she was moved to Ilopango women's prison, where was sentenced to serve 10 years for the loss of the fetus.
She isn't the first woman in El Salvador to be sent to prison for a sudden miscarriage.
Xiomara's lawyer, Dennis Munoz Estanley, says the conservative legal system in the country is predisposed to assume women like Xiomara are guilty. "She is yet another innocent victim of our unjust and discriminatory legal system, which jails poor, young women who suffer obstetric complications for murder on the most flimsy evidence," he told the BBC.
According to data from the Citizens' Group for the Decriminalization of Abortion, more than 200 women in El Salvador were reported to the police for miscarriages between 2000 and 2011. Of these women, 129 were prosecuted and 49 were convicted, some receiving sentences of up to 50 years.
One of these women, Cristina Quintanilla, was sentenced to three years in prison after miscarrying. Unlike Xiomara, who didn't know she was pregnant, Quintanilla and her husband were eagerly awaiting their second child when she unexpectedly miscarried in her seventh month.
"The medical reports couldn't explain why the baby died, but the prosecutor made me out to be a criminal who could have saved my baby even though I had passed out in pain," she says.
"I will never understand why they did this to me, I lost four years of my life and still don't know why I lost my baby."
Women who are imprisoned as a result of unexpected miscarriages aren't the only victims of the country's absolute ban on abortion.
The law was fiercely debated in the country back in April, when a critically ill woman named Beatriz, pregnant with a nonviable anencephalic fetus, was denied a therapeutic abortion by the Salvadorian Supreme Court.
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