Teodora Vasquez is one of 31 women imprisoned in El Salvador for falling foul of anti-abortion laws that are among the six most draconian on the planet.
A Salvadoran woman who has been jailed for a decade since her miscarriage was ruled an 'illegal abortion' has pleaded for her freedom before a court revising her 30-year prison sentence.
"I am paying for a crime I didn't commit," Teodora Vasquez, 34, told the tribunal in San Salvador.
Since the Constitution came into force in 1999 under the conservative government, abortionin the Central American nation has been illegal, regardless of whether pregnancy results from rape or poses any medical threat to the woman. Prison terms range from two to eight years.
But police and prosecutors often charge suspects with far more serious crimes — such as in Vasquez’s case, in which she was convicted and sentenced in 2008 for aggravated homicide.
She suffered a stillbirth in July 2007, in her ninth month of pregnancy, while at the school where she worked. She had tried to call paramedics, in vain, before falling unconscious. Police then accused her of inducing the miscarriage.
The prosecutor applied for the suspension of proceedings to have more time to study the case and to interview the arresting officers.
Her lawyer, along with rights groups such as Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch, have opposed the suspension and are calling for the court to annul the sentence in an international campaign.
The court has the options of scrapping the sentence, reducing it, upholding the original sentence, or ordering a new trial.
Vasquez' defense lawyer, Victor Hugo Mata, says there were "glaring errors" in his client's 2008 trial, not least the way in which the baby's cause of death was presented.
El Salvador's Congress has been debating for a year a proposal to decriminalize abortions in cases of rape, risk to the mother's life, or where fetuses are unlikely to survive.
The harshness of the current law was highlighted in 2013, when a 22-year-old woman was forced to give birth to a baby whose brain had not developed in the womb, and which was certain to die during delivery. The woman's own health was also deemed to be at serious risk.
The Inter-American Court of Human Rights gave a verdict allowing the woman to have an early cesarean section, after which the baby died.
Throwawaymypics on December 10th, 2017 at 06:58 UTC »
Lol my country made it to the front page.
For real though, the worst part about those shitty laws is that a girl from a rich family can just travel and get her abortion elsewhere. Poor people, like those women, get the scraps and jail time. Fuck ARENA, fuck FMLN, hell, fuck Nayib while you're at it. Every politician here is a populist. Don't think they're dumb; it's the people who are missinformed, the ones our shitty government refuses to educate.
Of course, if we were educated enough, none of this would happen, and they would 100% stop trying to push these shitty laws, not because they care about the good for our citiziens, no, but because they'll have to cater to a more educated society.
The status of education here is incredibly wrong. The other day I had to debate with a police officer who came to me because someone called about "a long haired beggar smoking weed". The reality was, I was vaping on a sidewalk. He tried to fine me for "littering" because there were cigarette butts around me. When he realized that electronic cigarettes don't leave butts, he instead tried to fine me because of me "releasing toxins to the air". I started to debate with him about that (I used to study law, so I was carrying all my codes and laws), but he quickly backed up the moment I flexed about working with lawyers. Our Police Force is not at all qualified to be patrolling the streets with guns, because they know nothing about laws. Ignorance is the driving force in this shithole of a country.
Pisforpotato on December 10th, 2017 at 03:28 UTC »
El Salvador has one of the highest murder rates in Latin America and has human trafficking and drug issues, but hey let's jail innocent people instead.
PagingDoctorLove on December 10th, 2017 at 01:36 UTC »
This is fucked.