El Salvador – These women say their babies were stillborn. Courts convicted them of homicide in a country with harsh abortion laws

By Catherine E. Shoichet, CNN
Sun October 8, 2023

A sign greets visitors arriving at a sun-filled two-story house in El Salvador’s capital.

“You must enter smiling,” it says. “Before you come in, you will find an invisible bag where you can leave your sorrows. When you leave, you can decide whether to take them with you.”

Teodora Vásquez knows the women seeking shelter, support or a fresh start here often have decades of sorrows weighing on them. And she’s propped up this sign beside a green plastic turtle near the front door as a first step toward the healing she hopes they’ll start to find within these walls.

Continued: https://www.cnn.com/2023/10/08/health/el-salvador-abortion-homicide-convictions-cec/index.html

El Salvador – How total abortion ban puts maternal health at risk

Study finds high rates of serious complications among Salvadoran patients who were forced to carry severely malformed fetuses to term

BY Nikki Rojas, Harvard Staff Writer
January 25, 2023

Pregnant patients in El Salvador, who, under the nation’s abortion ban, had no choice but to carry fetuses with severe malformations to term, experienced high rates of maternal morbidity, according to new research by Harvard sociologist Jocelyn Viterna and two partner Salvadoran physicians. The study, which examined 239 pregnancies with one of 18 malformations typically considered fatal between 2013 and 2018, appears in the American Journal of Obstetrics and Gynecology Global Reports.

In explaining why they took up their research, Viterna and co-authors Carolina Mena Ugarte and María Virginia Rodríguez Funes, wrote that a “striking number of national and subnational governments that previously allowed legal abortion in cases of severe fetal anomaly” had passed laws to remove the allowances, but that little was known about the maternal health implications.

Continued: https://news.harvard.edu/gazette/story/2023/01/how-total-abortion-ban-puts-maternal-health-at-risk/

25.01.2023

María Virginia Rodríguez Funes

National Women’s Hospital

Salvadoran women jailed for abortion warn US of total ban

By LUIS ANDRES HENAO and JESSIE WARDARSKI
Jun 9, 2022

SAN SALVADOR, El Salvador (AP) — Teodora del Carmen Vásquez was nine months pregnant and working at a school cafeteria when she felt extreme pain in her back, like the crack of a hammer. She called 911 seven times before fainting in a bathroom in a pool of blood.

The nightmare that followed is common in El Salvador, a heavily Catholic country where abortion is banned under all circumstances and even women who suffer miscarriages and stillbirths are sometimes accused of killing their babies and sentenced to years or even decades in prison.

Continued: https://apnews.com/article/abortion-politics-health-caribbean-religion-8dcebe19ea1d3f20ef288463f4392da4

El Salvador – They Were Jailed for Miscarriages. Now, Campaign Aims to End Abortion Ban.

They Were Jailed for Miscarriages. Now, Campaign Aims to End Abortion Ban.

By ELISABETH MALKIN
APRIL 9, 2018

SAN SALVADOR — When Teodora del Carmen Vásquez walked out of the Ilopango women’s prison a few weeks ago, she embraced her parents, her teenage son — and a movement to change an anti-abortion law that stole more than a decade of her life.

In El Salvador, where a total ban on abortion leads to an immediate suspicion of women whose pregnancies do not end with a healthy baby, Ms. Vásquez was marked as a criminal after she began bleeding and suffered a stillbirth. Sentenced to 30 years for aggravated homicide, she was released only after the Supreme Court ruled that there was not enough evidence to show she had killed her baby.

Continued: https://www.nytimes.com/2018/04/09/world/americas/el-salvador-abortion.html