In El Salvador, women thrown in jail for miscarriages and stillbirths

[Judi Lynn]

In El Salvador, women thrown in jail for miscarriages and stillbirths
TRACY WILKINSON
Last updated 18:57, April 20 2015

When Guadalupe Vasquez became pregnant at 17 after being raped by a neighbor of the house in San Salvador where she worked as a maid, she decided she wanted the baby. She even picked out a name: Gabriel.

Then, on a day in late 2007, pain shot through her back and abdomen. Vasquez says she started bleeding, but her employer wouldn't let her leave the house to get medical care. Sick in her room and alone, she went into labor. She heard the baby cry briefly, and then he was dead.

Only then did the employer send her to the hospital, saying she did not want to "deal with two dead in my house," Vasquez recalls. She passed out, and when she came to, she was handcuffed to the bed at a state hospital. The rapist was free, but now it would be Vasquez who would go to prison - for seven years and three months.

Vasquez is one of several women in El Salvador who have been sentenced to as long as 50 years behind bars - not for having an abortion, which is illegal in the country, but as a result of miscarriages or stillborn births. In these cases, prosecutors have accused the women of causing the death of their fetus or infant.

More:
http://www.stuff.co.nz/world/americas/67903666/in-el-salvador-women-thrown-in-jail-for-miscarriages-and-stillbirths

[forest444]

1. So much in common with our Teahadists.

To think that the mere mention of "El Salvador" to a right-wing Republican will often elicit the loudest tirades of vitriol and racism.

http://www.dailykos.com/story/2011/02/27/949116/-Georgia-Republican-wants-death-penalty-for-miscarriages

http://www.care2.com/causes/republicans-in-tennessee-try-to-criminalize-miscarriages.html

http://thinkprogress.org/justice/2013/05/20/2035411/virginia-gop-nominee-for-attorney-general-would-force-women-to-report-their-miscarriages-to-police/

[Judi Lynn]

2. Horrifying. This shows Republican lawmakers trying to treat women as earlier right-wingers

treated the women they suspected of being "witches."

Absolutely incomprehensible.

The information I read in your 3 links is compelling. Clearly our ordinary corporate media goes to great lengths to keep US citizens from learning enough about this pathological misogyny. How can they say they have any respect or abiding concern for the women in their own lives when they are so obsessed with delving, prying, peering into the private lives of women they've never met, in order to control them in the most intensely intimate decisions they ever have to make about THEIR own lives?

Nosey, brutal, primitive butting in, with fangs. Clearly they don't have the vaguest understanding of how to control themselves, or they wouldn't be trying so hard to control others in their personal decisions.