Friday, May 31, 2013

El Salvador: pregnant woman denied the right to abortion in de facto sentence of death

Beatriz, 22, suffering of lupus and severe renal problems, requested the Supreme Court of El Salvador to be allowed to abort, being an extreme case in which the child will no doubt die anyhow (suffers anencephalia: has not developed the brain) and, if the mother manages to survive at all, she will bear further severe complications in her illness.

However the high court rejected her plea because abortion is absolutely forbidden in the Central American country, no matter what. 

Beatriz, mother of a 18 months old toddler, explains that the hospital team did not dare to perform the abortion because, under the fundamentalist law, they would be judged for "murder" and punished with up to 12 years of prison. The aborting mother would be punished with as much as 50 years.

Even if she would manage to travel outside the country and be intervened in another state where abortion is legal, she would still be liable for murder upon her return to El Salvador. 

Beatriz is pleading to President Mauricio Funes (Farabundo Martí National Liberation Front) to intervene on the matter urgently somehow. 

The dramatic situation caused by Christian Fundamentalist intolerance, which attacks women's freedoms as much as other kinds of religious fanaticism, reminds the recent similar case in the Republic of Ireland (another Christian Fundamentalist regime) where a woman was let to die in a very similar extreme case, not being allowed abortion under any circumstance. 

Source: Webguerrillero[es].


Update (Jun 4): the intervention of President Funes permitted that Beatriz was performed a "premature birth" intervention through cesarean, which resulted in the brainless fetus dying in minutes. She is now in intensive care. (→ Naiz Info[es]).

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