Women jailed for abortion warn U.S. of total ban

SAN SALVADOR, El Salvador — 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 inn prison.

When Vásquez regained consciousness, she had lost her nearly fullterm fetus. Instead of an ambulance, officers drove her in the bed of a pickup through heavy rain to a police station. There she was arrested on suspicion of violating El Salvador’s abortion law, one of the world’s strictest. Fearing she could die, authorities eventually rushed her to a hospital, where she was chained by her left foot to a gurney. She was prosecuted, convicted and given 30 years in prison for aggravated homicide.

“This is the reality that we have lived, and I am not alone,” said Vásquez, who ended up serving more than 10 years for what she has always said was a stillbirth. “Any woman who arrives to jail accused of having an abortion is seen as the most evil, heartless being.”

Abortion rights activists say the law has led to widespread human rights violations against Salvadoran women and should serve as a cautionary tale for the United States, where more than 20 states are expected to ban abortion if the Supreme Court overturns the landmark 1973 Roe v. Wade ruling in the coming weeks.

Women used to be able to seek abortions in cases of risk to their life, severe fetal malformations incompatible with life, or rape in El Salvador, a country of 6.5 million people nestled between Guatemala and Honduras along Central America’s Pacific Coast.

But that ended in the late 1990s with a law championed by anti-abortion activists, conservative lawmakers and the Catholic Church, followed by a constitutional amendment defining life as starting at conception.

Prosecution and punishment overwhelmingly fall on poor, young women who lack sufficient access to medical services and cannot afford to travel overseas for an abortion or pay for good legal defense if they run afoul of the law. Sometimes they are victims of rape, in a country with a high incidence of that crime.

One such woman, Imelda, was repeatedly raped from age 8 to 18 by her mother’s partner and became pregnant by him. In 2017 she unexpectedly gave birth to the baby in a latrine and then lost consciousness. The child survived, but Imelda was accused of attempted murder due to the circumstances of the birth.

She was freed from prison in 2018 after a court determined that she had not tried to kill her baby.