Lilian was arrested at Alba Hospital during the funeral of her stillborn baby. The two mothers were accused of killing the child they were carrying. They were sentenced to 30 years in prison in El Salvador, a country where abortion and obstetric complications are considered crimes.
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Lilian spent eight years behind bars and Alba ten. But her release following the review of her sentence is only an incomplete victory for Salvadoran women in a country that continues to uphold one of the world's strictest anti-abortion laws.
“I had a normal baby but suffered a uterine rupture. “I was anesthetized for a curettage,” Lilian, who only wanted to give her first name, told AFP after the birth. She only found out about her granddaughter's death when she woke up.
It was November 2015, she was 20 years old, with a first daughter aged two, a partner, a job and life ahead of her.
“I was accused of negligence for the first time” during pregnancy, “but the prosecutor's office classified it as aggravated murder and I was convicted.” “I thought my life was ruined forever,” she told AFP at a location in the capital, San Salvador, which was far out of sight.
Only a year ago she learned that her newborn had died of prenatal sepsis: “If she had been treated in time, she would not have died. “I wouldn’t have wasted so many years of my life in prison,” she laments.
With the help of the Feminist Collective and the Citizens Group to Decriminalize Abortion, Lilian was released from prison last November.
Lilian is the last to find freedom among the 73 Salvadoran women sentenced to prison terms of 30 to 50 years in the last decade.
Since a legal reform in 1998, abortion has been banned without exception, even in cases of rape or danger to the mother, as in Nicaragua, Honduras, Haiti and the Dominican Republic. But no country is as strict as El Salvador, where abortion is punishable by two to eight years in prison and can be classified as “aggravated murder.”
“The fight goes on”
What these women behind bars all have in common is that they come from disadvantaged rural areas where health care is precarious, explains Arturo Castellanos, a member of the Citizens Group for the Decriminalization of Abortion.
Some were even raped, like Alba Lorena Rodriguez. She was 21 years old and already had two young daughters when, in December 2009, five months pregnant, she felt severe pain and began “giving birth alone” and “fainted,” she says. The baby did not survive.
The next day, a neighbor called the police and she was arrested in the middle of a funeral service.
She says she had “no fair trial” and no one to defend her. “I felt like the world was collapsing around me because I knew I wouldn't see my daughters again and that I was being punished for something I didn't do.”
She denounces “an unjust law”: “The man who raped me was outside with his family and I (…) in prison,” says Ms. Rodriguez, who also agreed to testify to the AFP, however outside their neighborhood.
“When they are released from prison, often without family ties, these women are stigmatized,” explains Mr. Castellanos, who calls for a “change in the law.”
But President Nayib Bukele, who was re-elected for five years at the beginning of February and has a majority in parliament, has spoken out clearly against abortion.
For Lilian, “the hardest thing” was “not seeing her daughter grow up,” whom she had entrusted to her grandparents, whom she had only seen twice in eight years. “No one can give me back the time I lost. I am rebuilding the bond with my daughter. I want to turn this page of my life and start from scratch,” she says.
Despite the time that has passed, she is saddened by “the same law over and over again” and hopes that “the fight continues” so that other women do not have to suffer what she experienced.
Since 1998, 199 women have been convicted in El Salvador and seven are still being prosecuted.
In Latin America, abortion is only legal in Mexico, Argentina, Colombia, Cuba and Uruguay.