With one of the strictest anti-abortion laws in the world, Salvadoran women fear going to hospitals when they have an obstetric complication “to the detriment of their health or, sometimes, their life.”
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The treatment in the Inter-American Court of Human Rights of the Manuela case – a Salvadoran woman who died in prison convicted of aggravated homicide when she had suffered a precipitous delivery – revealed the Dramatic consequences of the criminalization of abortion in one of the five Latin American countries that prohibits the termination of pregnancy absolutely, where the dilemma of “jail or death is not a joke,” according to the Salvadoran feminist activist Morena Herrera told Tlam.
The case
At the beginning of 2008, Manuela, a poor and illiterate 31-year-old woman living in a rural area of the department of Morazn, in eastern El Salvador, was going through the third trimester of her third pregnancy.
On February 27, she suffered severe abdominal pain that forced her to go to her home latrine, where she fainted without knowing that she had suffered an obstetric emergency.
Upon arriving at the hospital, with heavy bleeding and symptoms of pre-eclampsia (pregnancy complication), the health personnel delayed medical attention, accused her of provoking an abortion to hide an alleged infidelity and called the police, who handcuffed her to a stretcher. and began questioning her without a lawyer.
Six months later, in a judicial process exprs, Justice sentenced her to 30 years in prison for aggravated murder. Two years later, she died of lymphatic cancer, handcuffed to a hospital gurney.
That same cancer, for which Manuela had already consulted for signs in 2007 and was not correctly diagnosed, would have been the cause of her obstetric emergency, according to the organizations that took her case before the Organization of American States (OAS ).
The intervention of the Inter-American Court of Human Rights
The Inter-American Court held public hearings on March 10 and 11 to hear the parties – Manuela’s family and associations versus the Salvadoran State – in an unpublished case for this court.
The process takes place almost ten years after the plaintiffs’ groups presented it in 2012 to the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights (IACHR), a year after exhausting legal remedies in the Salvadoran justice system.
In 2019, the IACHR took the case to court, concluding that the “Salvadoran State is responsible for the structural and systematic violation of the rights to life, personal liberty, judicial guarantees, private life, equality before the law, judicial protection and the right to health” of Manuela.
The ruling, which could take from six months to a year, be decisive not only for Manuela’s familybut for all women who suffer the same type of criminalization.
“We identified at least 181 women who have gone through a similar transit. Not all of them sentenced to 30 years in prison, but they were reported in hospitals and prosecuted: some for abortion and others convicted of aggravated homicide,” said Herrera, coordinator of the Agrupacin Citizen for the Decriminalization of Therapeutic and Eugenic Abortion, one of the plaintiffs.
The Inter-American Court of Human Rights intervened in the case
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“In El Salvador, the dilemma of death or jail is no joke”
Although the Salvadoran Penal Code prohibits any type of abortion with penalties of up to eight years in prison, prosecutors and judges classify cases of pregnancy termination, even involuntary ones, as “aggravated homicide”, punishable by up to 50 years.
With one of the strictest anti-abortion laws in the world, Salvadoran women fear going to hospitals when they have an obstetric complication “to the detriment of their health or, sometimes, their life” due to the legal insecurity of health personnel, who suffer “pressure” to report, Herrera explained.
In the country, 28% of all pregnancies were of minors between 10 and 19 years old, according to the latest data from the Salvadoran Ministry of Health, of which only 5.4% were registered in schools.
“For several years, suicide is the leading indirect cause of maternal death in adolescent women, which reflects that they face imposed or unwanted pregnancies without any option and seek death “, lamented the human rights defender.
“In El Salvador, the dilemma of death or jail is not a joke,” he said.
Morena Herrera, feminist activist.
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Faced with this situation, the complainant organizations asked the Inter-American Court to recognize the context of the absolute criminalization of abortion in the Manuela case, since, according to Herrera, this does not occur in the “abstract”, but “in a society that persecutes, punishes and condemns women. “
Beyond the sentence, the activist stressed the importance of Manuela’s story being heard by this regional court.
The defense seeks that the court recognize the chain of human rights violations suffered by Manuela, that it take measures of integral reparation to her family and also of non-repetition, to avoid new cases like hers.
A precedent that could be emblematic not only for El Salvador, but for the 24 countries that ratified the American Convention on Human Rights, since the judgment of the Inter-American Court will mean creating mandatory standards for all signatories.
The defense seeks that the court recognize the chain of human rights violations suffered by Manuela, that it take measures of integral reparation to her family and also of non-repetition”
“My mother was sentenced to 30 years. They made my grandfather sign a document when he did not know how to read or write and did not know what he was signing and that he was incriminating her. They threatened to put my grandmother in prison. I gave my mother a moral penalty and she died, “Santos de Jess, 21, Manuela’s eldest son, told a press conference prior to the hearing.
“I don’t want this to happen (to another family) because one suffers. We have my grandmother, but mom’s love is not the same. We don’t want this to happen to another woman.“, express.
Herrera, for his part, was optimistic about Manuela’s process and about the impact that the verdict could have on the country.
“We think that the Government of (Nayib) Bukele cares a lot about its international image and that we can make it a factor in its favor, but we also hope that it understands that it has to repair the mistakes of the past,” he pointed out and concluded: “He has said it in other things and now it can do it because it has the Congress with a majority, so today they have no excuse.
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