El Salvador: Where it is Illegal to Have a Miscarriage

Abortion laws have been the topic of conversation for years with strict Catholic countries banning the procedure. Latin America, some states in U.S.A and even in Ireland it is illegal to have an abortion (in Ireland and U.S.A it is legal in incredibly rare cases).

Take the case of a 13 year old Irish girl, who can't be named for legal reasons, she got pregnant after being raped by a paedophile. Under inhumane Irish law she was not consented an abortion. After much debate the girl was taken to Britain, where our laws are more in touch with the modern world, and had she had the abortion.

I understand fully that abortion and miscarriage are not the same thing, in the middle of Latin America, lies a tiny country: El Salvador (the smallest of all central American countries). Women in this poor, strictly catholic country are being imprisoned for having miscarriages.

The slums some pregnant women can find themselves living in, no wonder there is so many miscarriages with this standard of living. Picture courtesy if Internationalparnters.org
 

A women, Cristina Quintanilla, was seven months pregnant when she had her miscarriage, the BBC report. She passed out after having a terrible pain and bleeding in her womb, she was taken to hospital. When she regained consciousness at hospital she was interrogated by police then handcuffed to her hospital bed. She was sentenced to 30 years imprisonment for the death of her unborn child. The prosecution in court labelled Quintanilla a child murderer claiming she could have done more to save her child, yet she had passed out before the miscarriage through the incapable pain.

This is not the only occurrence more women are being imprisoned some for 15 years for manslaughter, others, 50 years for murder of their unborn children. And what's more the church in El Salvador are supporting these sentences. El Salvador's churches are well known to be right wing and conservative - no concern over the poor - even though most of El Salvadorians survive on less than one pound a day.

In some poor parts of the world nearly 25% of women can suffer from a miscarriage. In El Salvador experts are unsure what the rate is but it is estimated to be extremely high. Yet not all women who suffer the pain of a miscarriage are arrested - it is only the poor. Surely the poor need more support when suffering a miscarriage, than a rich citizen. Most poor women are on their own (no husband/boyfriend) to support them so when going through a miscarriage where do they get emotional support from? It's certainly not a prison. Most poor women are more likely to go through a miscarriage than a rich women as well through diet and their standard of living yet once again like most things in the world; it's the poor who suffer.

Special cases in El Salvador are also over looked by this abortion/miscarriage law, such as the Beatriz case earlier this year. She was told in her pregnancy her baby was an awfully deformed foetus, she applied for an abortion. While the supreme court deliberated for months on whether she can have an abortion Beatriz gave birth; hours after giving birth the baby died.

People protesting on the 'Beatriz case'. Picture courtesy of realitycheck.org

Now I have never been involved in trying for a baby with someone but if somebody has a miscarriage I can imagine it is one of the worst feelings one can have. Losing something that has been so precious to you can hurt. It's a mother instincts to looks after her baby even if it is unborn - to then be under arrest hours later for it's murder I can't even think of a word to describe how one would feel!

With a strict and quite frankly absurd law this has had other implications on El Salvador. In recent years the most common cause of death in young women is suicide half of them were pregnant, that, I am sure is no coincidence.

Protests and campaigns are underway in El Salvador to abolish this law which was updated in 1998 but there is still a long way to go. It is mostly poor people who are protesting but the effect it is having is questionable.