America should heed the suffering caused by El Salvador’s abortion ban

The writer is a member of Colectiva Feminista and a president of the Agrupación Ciudadana abortion rights NGO in El Salvador

I can still feel the anguish I experienced when El Salvador’s legislature voted to outlaw abortion in April 1997. I addressed the Legislative Assembly on behalf of feminist groups. So did the organisation Yes to Life — although they, of course, got much more time. We took part not because we thought we were going to change the way the vote would go — that was a foregone conclusion — but because we wanted to draw attention to three things.

First, that women were being denied the right to a presumption of innocence agreed in the 1992 peace accords that ended El Salvador’s 12-year civil war. Second, we wanted to show that in this country, there are people who think differently. Third, and above all, we wanted to put on record that women would be accused and convicted under this legislation and would come to feminist groups for help.

We wish we hadn’t been right. It’s been a quarter of a century since that terrible night when legislators in San Salvador celebrated by joining hands in prayer: they had achieved their goal. Earlier this summer, after long and careful preparation, the US Supreme Court overturned its landmark Roe vs Wade ruling which had enshrined the constitutional right to abortion since 1973.

The same conservatives who celebrated here are now lauding the US decision. Soon, many US states will resemble El Salvador, where our experience has shown us that prohibition turns into persecution and criminalisation. Here, it is the poorest women who suffer most, and it will be the same in the US. According to our research, nearly 196 women who have been put on trial under El Salvador’s abortion ban, which extends to women suffering miscarriages or obstetric emergencies, stand accused of seeking terminations. Of those, 71 have received sentences ranging from 15 to 50 years for murder and attempted murder. Through our intervention, 65 have now been freed. Five are still in jail.

When abortion becomes a crime, the procedure becomes clandestine, illegal and unsafe. The ban also penalises the medical and health professionals who assist in abortions. US medics — like those in El Salvador — will find their hands are tied when saving the life of a patient means terminating a pregnancy.

Restrictive abortion laws and policies also have a high economic and social cost, especially for poor women and their families who struggle to pay for expensive private treatment. When they can’t, they can face dire health consequences, and even death.

In the US, there will be a rise in preventable maternal deaths in those states implementing more restrictive regulations. They might try to hide the data, as El Salvador has done, but the reality is clear. Take the case of Claudia Veracruz Zuñiga, diagnosed in 2017 with a heart condition when she was 20 weeks pregnant. Obstetricians recommended a termination to save her life, predicting she would not survive even to 28 weeks. When Claudia died a few weeks later, her death was recorded not as a maternal fatality, but a cardiac one.

Lupus sufferer Beatriz Garcia applied for a hospital abortion in 2013 after doctors diagnosed her foetus with a fatal abnormality. When the request was denied by the Supreme Court, she had a Caesarean which caused a massive haemorrhage. The baby, born with no brain, died within hours; Beatriz’s health was seriously compromised and she died four years later from complications following a traffic accident. Her case is currently before the Inter-American Court of Human Rights. As she said: “I just want to live.”

While the abortion legislation in the US and El Salvador might be different, the suffering brought by these prohibitive laws will be the same. Only social and political mobilisation in favour of women’s rights and their autonomy over their own bodies can transform this reality — not just for the benefit of women, but for all of society.