Fifty years in prison is what mothers who give birth to a stillborn baby risk in this Spanish-speaking country. A double punishment for those who have to face the loss of their child. Nearly 200 women have already been convicted.
While France wishes to include abortion in the Constitution, some countries remain firmly opposed to the freedom for women to resort to abortion. Others allowAbortion under conditions and according to the number of weeks of amenorrhea. Thus, depending on the country in which they live, women are not all in the same boat. Indeed, abortion can sometimes be prohibited even in cases of rape or danger to the health of the mother, as in Nicaragua, Honduras, Haiti and the Dominican Republic. But another country located not far from Mexico goes further, with one of the most severely punished anti-abortion laws in the world.
Yes, in this day and age, mothers who give birth to a stillborn baby not only have to overcome the pain of losing a child. But they also risk spending the rest of their lives behind bars since the penalty incurred is 50 years of imprisonment for this tragedy considered a crime in El Salvador.
“I had a normal baby, but suffered a uterine rupture. I was anesthetized for a curettage” told AFP Lilian, who spent 8 years in prison after learning, when she woke up, of the death of her little daughter who died at birth in 2015. “I was first accused of negligence” during the pregnancy, “but the prosecution reclassified it as aggravated homicide and I was convicted. I believed that my life was ruined forever”, she confides. Years later, Lilian learned that her baby had died due to antenatal sepsis. “If she had been treated in time, she wouldn’t have died. I wouldn’t have wasted so many years of my life in prison.”
Supported by the Feminist Collective and the Citizen Group for the decriminalization of abortion, the young mother was able to be released from prison in November 2023. Since 1998, 199 women have been sentenced in El Salvador for sentences lasting from 30 to 50 years in prison. Seven of them are still being prosecuted today. Punished for a crime they did not commit, these women, forced to mourn behind bars, denounce this unjust law.