Jacobin
One recent night in San Salvador, I was driving through some of the more notorious gang neighborhoods in the area with a photojournalist friend, who was scouting for homicides. As we turned down a street in the municipality of Ilopango, my friend pointed out a looming structure — the Ilopango women’s prison — where, it turns out, a number of women convicted of abortion-related crimes are incarcerated.
El Salvador has some of the most draconian abortion laws on the planet. Since 1998, the procedure has been totally banned — including in cases of rape and incest, or when the mother’s life is in danger. Even having a miscarriage can land you behind bars. The charge is often “aggravated homicide,” which can carry a sentence of up to fifty years (ironic considering San Salvador is among the world’s murder capitals — you’d think the police would have enough actual homicides to deal with).
A new documentary titled En Deuda con Todas — produced by the Galician organization Agareso — offers a striking glimpse at the war on reproductive and human rights in El Salvador. One protagonist is Teodora Vásquez, released from prison in 2018 after her thirty-year sentence was commuted to ten. Her crime? “Killing” her newborn by fainting during labor. She was awaiting the arrival of an ambulance and awoke to find her baby dead.
Then there’s twenty-six-year-old Sara Rogel, a chipper, ponytailed inmate at a prison in the Salvadoran department of Sonsonate, who is six years and four months into her own three-decade sentence for “aggravated homicide” — this one for slipping and falling in her home while pregnant. Requiring urgent medical attention, Rogel recounts how the police showed up and attempted to handcuff her before the surgeon was even done.
In fact, medics are frequently the ones to alert Salvadoran law enforcement to obstetrical complications potentially qualifying as prosecutable offenses. Failure to do so can mean violating the Salvadoran constitution — Article 1 of the document recognizes human life as beginning from the very moment of conception. READ MORE AT JACOBIN.
