“I was unconscious. When I woke up and saw the police were there, they were handcuffing me […] I didn’t even understand […] I only know that they just beat me, treated me very badly and at the end, when I asked what was happening, they told me I had killed my daughter and would be 50, 60 years in jail for the crime I had committed.”
With these words, Teodora Vázquez explains the circumstances of her detention, after giving birth to a stillborn child in 2007. She was convicted of ‘aggravated homicide’, sentenced to 30 years and only released in 2018, after a long legal battle.
While El Salvador has an absolute ban on abortion, it also routinely prosecutes women who suffer miscarriages or deliver stillborn babies for ‘aggravated homicide’. Some women have been prosecuted after seeking medical advice for complications during pregnancy that led to miscarriage, on suspicion of having attempted an abortion.
