El Salvador and Dominican Republic are sending pregnant women to their deaths
Last month, Maira Verónica Figueroa Marroquín was released from a Salvadoran prison after serving 15 years for having a stillbirth. In El Salvador, where abortion is illegal in all circumstances, women who have abortions, miscarriages or stillbirths can be charged with aggravated homicide without any direct proof. Such was the case for Maira, who was 19 when she became pregnant after a sexual assault. While being treated for severe bleeding following a stillbirth, she was accused of having an abortion and handcuffed to her hospital bed. Authorities detained her the same day and a judge swiftly sentenced her to 30 years in prison for “aggravated homicide.”
Today, Maira is home, safe with her family. But more than 20 Salvadoran women remain in prison, their lives casualties of the country’s criminalization of abortion. While the harsh criminal penalty Maira experienced is specific to El Salvador, the country’s abortion ban is not. Altogether, six countries — including the Dominican Republic, Haiti, Honduras, Nicaragua and Suriname — ban abortion in all circumstances, including when a woman’s life is at risk or in cases of rape of a minor.
This spring, El Salvador and the Dominican Republic are on the precipice of progress. Both countries’ legislatures will consider proposals to end their extreme policies and decriminalize abortion. These countries must end this outright ban so that women whose lives are at risk and girls who have become pregnant by rape can make their own hard decisions about their futures.
Total abortion bans not only affect how women live; they affect how women die. The Dominican Republic, where 30 percent of the population lives in poverty, has one of the highest maternal mortality rates in Latin America. For every woman who dies during pregnancy or childbirth in the United States, at least three women will die in the Dominican Republic. And, out of all pregnancy-related deaths, one in three women die because of a terminal disease that went untreated because of the pregnancy.
Category: DR News |