Dec 8, 2023
Aisha Sultan, Columnist and features writer
Imagine dealing with the trauma of losing a pregnancy and facing a police investigation and criminal charges in the midst of your grief and devastation.
It seems like a dystopian nightmare. Why would a woman, already physically and emotionally wrecked, be put through this kind of cruelty by the state? It’s been happening more often than most people realize.
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
Experts say drug use is rarely the cause of miscarriage or still birth, but prosecution of women who test positive for drugs still happens — and could get more common in the wake of the Dobbs decision
By Cary Aspinwall, Brianna Bailey and Amy Yurkanin, Washington Post
September 1, 2022
Some were already mothers, excited about having another baby. Others were upset or frightened to find themselves pregnant. All tested positive for drugs. And when these women lost their pregnancies, each ended up in jail.
More than 50 women have been prosecuted for child neglect or manslaughter in the United States since 1999 because they tested positive for drug use after a miscarriage or stillbirth, according to an investigation by the Marshall Project, the Frontier and AL.com that was co-edited and published in partnership with The Washington Post.
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.
My new film documents how more than 50 Salvadoran women serving lengthy prison terms have been set free by feminist activism
Mariana Carbajal
21 March 2022
“I was
unconscious. When I woke up and saw the police were there, they were
handcuffing me... I didn't even understand... I only know that they just beat
me, treated me very badly, and at the end when I asked what was happening, they
told me I had killed my daughter and would be 50, 60 years in jail for the
crime I had committed.”
With these words, Teodora Vázquez explains the circumstances of her detention,
after giving birth a stillborn child in 2007. She was convicted of ‘aggravated
homicide’, sentenced to 30 years, and released in 2018 after a long legal
battle.
Salvadoran prosecutors take aim, again, at woman in abortion case
September 6, 2019
SAN SALVADOR (Reuters) - The attorney general’s office of El Salvador announced on Friday it will appeal last month’s acquittal of a young woman accused of killing her stillborn son, marking what would be her third trial in the socially conservative Central American country.
Evelyn Hernandez was exonerated in an August retrial after an earlier judgment found her guilty of homicide and sentenced her to 30 years in prison.
Hernandez, 21, said she was raped by a gang member and was unaware of her pregnancy until just before delivering a stillborn son in early 2016.
Continued: https://ca.reuters.com/article/topNews/idCAKCN1VR2J0-OCATP
This dystopian trial in El Salvador is what a total ban on abortion looks like
By Annalisa Merelli
August 20, 2019
When she was 18, Evelyn Beatríz Hernández Cruz, a high-school student from a poor family in Cojutepeque, El Salvador, was raped repeatedly, over the span of few months, by the member of a local gang. She unknowingly became pregnant and, in 2016, suffered a stillbirth during her third trimester.
She then spent nearly three years in prison, battling the country’s strict abortion laws.
Continued: https://qz.com/1688556/this-trial-in-el-salvador-is-what-a-total-abortion-ban-looks-like/
Retrial for teenage rape victim accused of inducing an abortion and convicted of aggravated murder resumes
August 15, 2019
by CNN Wire
The retrial of a teenage rape victim will resume on Thursday in El Salvador, in a case that has drawn global attention to the country’s strict anti-abortion laws.
Evelyn Beatriz Hernandez, now 21, will return to the Ciudad Delgado courtroom, after being accused of inducing an abortion and convicted of aggravated murder when she was a teenager. She pled not guilty to these charges when the retrial began last month.
In anti-abortion El Salvador, woman faces second homicide trial after baby stillborn
Nelson Renteria, Reuters
August 1, 2019
SAN SALVADOR — Salvadoran maid Evelyn Hernandez says she did not realize she was pregnant when as an 18-year-old she delivered a stillborn son after a three-day stomach ache. A court in the Central American country, which bans abortion under all circumstances, ruled it aggravated homicide.
Prosecutors claimed that she had induced an abortion, and Hernandez was sentenced to 30 years. After she served nearly three years, the Supreme Court in February ordered her released and re-tried because the original judge’s decision was based on prejudice and insufficient evidence.
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