Guardian · 14 days ago

Jailed for Losing a pregnancy: How Progress on El Salvador’s Harsh anti-abortion Law Is Unravelling

For years, activists in El Salvador won freedom for 81 women imprisoned after miscarriages and stillbirths under the country's total abortion ban -- women who had gone to hospitals seeking help and left in handcuffs, facing decades behind bars for obstetric emergencies. Now that fragile progress has collapsed under President Nayib Bukele's state of emergency, which suspended due process in the name of fighting gangs but has quietly expanded into hospital rooms, where cameras watch and medical staff report patients under threat of prosecution. "Women go to hospitals seeking medical help, are identified as suspected of having induced an abortion and prosecuted," explains reproductive rights advocate Morena Herrera, who helped free those 81 women and now watches at least 29 more face investigation, including one charged after her baby died in a breech delivery. The legal networks that once protected women have crumbled under a climate of fear, and the advocacy group that fought for two decades to free them has dissolved, unable to continue its work. What remains is a question that reaches far beyond one country's borders: whether the world will notice when women are disappeared not by gangs, but by going into labor.