El Salvador, the country where women get jailed for having a miscarriage

[Judi Lynn]

El Salvador, the country where women get jailed for having a miscarriage

In the UK, it can feel like Latin America had simply been wiped off the map, but women there are facing terrible injustices that completely escape our attention.

by Caroline Criado-Perez Published 25 June, 2015 - 16:43

When Guadalupe Vasquez was raped by her employer’s neighbour, she didn’t report it. She came from a poor family and was only 17. She didn’t think she would be believed – and in any case, the neighbour had warned her not to tell anyone.

She decided to keep the baby. She had little other choice, being from El Salvador, where abortion is illegal under all circumstances, including rape, incest, and even when the mother’s life is in danger, or the foetus is not viable. But Vasquez seems to have loved her baby, despite his violating conception. She prepared for his birth. She gave him a name: Gabriel. Her body started to change; her belly started to swell.

And then she started bleeding. When Vasquez felt the intense pain across her back and abdomen, she asked her employer to let her go to hospital. The employer refused. A few hours later, Guadelupe gave birth to Gabriel on her own in her room. He cried once, and then died.

Faced with a dead baby and a still bleeding mother, Vasquez’s employer finally allowed her to go to hospital. “I don’t want to deal with two dead in my house.” At the public hospital, Vasquez was treated for her haemorrhage. Her life was saved. And then the police were called.

More:
http://www.newstatesman.com/politics/2015/06/el-salvador-country-where-women-get-jailed-having-miscarriage

[Warpy]

1. Gee, that employer was all heart.

Probably climbed up on the cross for keeping a pregnant, unmarried maid around.

This isn't even the worst story there. Women are butchering themselves rather than keep pregnancies they don't want, are not equipped to deal with. This is what churchmens' antiabortion laws do to us. Antiabortion laws kill us.

The men who pass them, of course, don't care. Any woman who is impregnated by anyone but them has got to be a slut deserving of punishment and pregnancy is punishment.