30 years’ jail for stillbirth, now I’ll change law
The extreme abortion legislation that put Teodora Vásquez behind bars faces a historic vote in El Salvador NINE months’ pregnant, Teodora Vásquez woke up on the day she would lose her second child concerned that the baby wasn’t moving. By early evening she was crumpled with pain as she finished her shift at the cafeteria of a private school in San Salvador.
Ms Vásquez called for an ambulance but waited for three hours and by that time had given birth to a dead baby girl in the lavatory. When she staggered out to look for help she was met by a police officer who accused her of murder.
Six months later Ms Vásquez was sentenced to 30 years for aggravated homicide. After 10 years and seven months in jail she walked free in February, her sentence commuted, and finally hugged the teenage boy she had barely seen since he was a toddler.
“My son gave me the strength to keep going while I was inside, even though I didn’t see him,” the softly-spoken 35-year-old told The Daily Telegraph a month after her release. “I had lost one child, and I was not prepared to lose the other.”
Her son, who she describes as beautiful, was brought up by his grandparents while she was in jail.
“He says that he is proud of me. Proud to have a mother like me. And we want to make the most of the time we now have together.”
Ms Vásquez was jailed because of El Salvador’s anti-abortion legislation that outlaws all terminations without exception, and implements the legislation with a crusading zeal that seems intent on equating not just abortions, but any obstetric emergencies, with murder.
There are no official statistics on the number of women imprisoned for such crimes. The activist organisation that helped secure Ms Vásquez’s release, known as the Citizen’s Group, has to rely on word of mouth to identify cases.
Monica Herrera, who heads the group, says there are currently 24 women in prison serving sentences ranging from six to 35 years, and another 19-year-old accused of attempted homicide and facing a possible 15-year sentence after she gave birth to her stepfather’s child in a latrine. The baby was found alive.
The country is now facing a historic vote in parliament that would decriminalise abortion – but only in the case of rape, danger to the mother’s health, or life-threatening fetal impairment. The vote is likely to be close.
El Salvador has one of the world’s most extreme abortion laws, but a recent report by US women’s rights group the Guttmacher Institute highlights 64 other countries that either prohibit all abortions, or only allow them in order to save a woman’s life.
For women in countries that restrict access to reproductive healthcare the stigma attached to abortion or stillbirth is great. For five years Ms Vásquez told nobody why she was in prison for fear of being beaten up. She only realised she was not alone when lawyers from Citizen’s Group sought her out, along with other prisoners in similar situations.
‘Every one of us who was in prison for these crimes was poor and came from a rural area. Every one’
We began to lose our fear a little because there were more of us,” she recalled. “We started to talk about it and that helped. It helped me to get those feelings out so that when I finally left prison I wasn’t eaten up by anger, resentment and hate.”
And poverty also made things worse. Vásquez didn’t see her son for the last four years of her incarceration because her family couldn’t afford the time or money to do the onerous paperwork required, or make the long journey from their village to the prison in the capital.
“Every one of us who was in prison for these crimes was poor and came from a rural area,” she said. “Every one.”
When she finally did hear that she had been released it took a while for the news to sink in.
“I couldn’t believe it. I read that piece of paper about 20,000 times until I was absolutely sure that I hadn’t read it wrong,” she says.
Vásquez says she bears no grudges because she is too busy enjoying her freedom. But, she also wants to change things so that young women can avoid the kind of suffering she endured.
“I changed in prison and now I think that we women have the right to decide what happens to us,” says the woman who entered prison with three years of primary schooling and now plans to become a lawyer. “Now I think that if somebody gets pregnant and doesn’t want to have the child, then that is something personal to them.”
She adds: “They committed a real injustice with me but I don’t want to feel resentment. I don’t want revenge. I don’t want any of that, because it would take away the time I have now.”