By Alejandra Garcia on June 10, 2022
Lesly Ramirez
El Salvador has committed a great injustice, on an almost unthinkable level. A 21-year-old girl was sentenced to 50 years in prison for “aggravated homicide” due to miscarriage. Lesly Ramirez lost her baby in an obstetric emergency and, as a result, became the first woman to receive the maximum penalty since abortion was criminalized outright in the country in 2021.
Lesly, who was 19 when she lost her pregnancy, is the third of seven siblings in a family that lives in extreme poverty, with no access to clean water or electricity and subsists on agricultural work. She went to school until the 7th grade, and has been taking care of her four younger siblings since she stopped studying.
The girl had suffered from gender-based violence in her home since she was little. According to women’s rights defenders, Lesly didn’t even know she was pregnant when she went into labor.
Before the judges, she described, “I felt something coming out of me. It was dark. I couldn’t see a thing. I got scared and panicked. Everything was confusing. It was my first pregnancy, and I didn’t even know of my condition.”
Family members, far from helping Lesly, decided to call the police to have her taken to a hospital, where she was arrested and charged initially with abortion and, later, with “aggravated homicide.”
According to the investigation by the Prosecutor’s Office, the young woman, who lived in a rural area in the east of the country, “hid her pregnancy from family members and had an out-of-hospital delivery. She gave birth to a baby girl, who was born alive at the 37 and 40 weeks of gestation.”
The forensic report determined the cause of death of the baby was an alleged “throat-slitting due to a contusive-cutting wound caused by a sharp weapon.”
“This happened because there are judges and prosecutors who make judgments without having known the background of the stories,” the president of Citizens’ Association for the Decriminalization of Therapeutic, Ethical, and Eugenic Abortion (Acdatee) Morena Herrera said.
When the judicial decision was made public last August 29, anger was unleashed in El Salvador and the world. “The Salvadoran state once again continues to criminalize women who have had neither the right nor the conditions to defend themselves,” Herrera commented.
According to the group that defends Women’s Rights in El Salvador, the legal process against the young woman was full of irregularities and prejudices and, in addition, the judge didn’t admit evidence that proved her innocence.
Salvadoran law criminalizes all forms of abortion, including therapeutic abortion, and punishes both the women and the doctors who perform them. If found guilty, penalties range from two to eight years. However, in many cases, the crime is enhanced to aggravated homicide due to the victim’s kinship. This means that women can be sentenced to 30 to 50 years in prison.
The leader of the feminist collective added that this sentence is contrary to the Inter-American Court of Human Rights (IACHR) ruling in the case “Manuela vs El Salvador”.
In November 2020, the IACHR declared the Salvadoran State violated the rights of a woman identified as “Manuela”, who was arrested in 2008 and died in prison after being sentenced to 30 years. Her two children were left orphaned.
The collective claims that “Manuela” was denied medical assistance while in detention. The IACHR urged the government not to persecute or criminalize women who face obstetric emergencies.
However, since December 2021, El Salvador has convicted nine women who suffered obstetric emergencies. So far, Lesly is the first person to receive the maximum sentence due to a miscarriage.
Citizens’ Association, which represents the young woman in the judicial process, will appeal the ruling handed down on June 29 by a court in San Miguel, located 135 kilometers east of the capital. “Lesly is not alone,” it assured.
El Salvador is one of four Latin American countries that prohibit abortion without exceptions, along with Nicaragua, Honduras, and the Dominican Republic. Human rights organizations have demanded President Nayib Bukele ban the law that prohibits this medical procedure, but he refuses to do so.
The depravity of punishing poor women for their unwanted, and in this case unknown pregnancy, breaks all boundaries of human ethics. Here in Cuba where women are guaranteed their right to choose and are taken care of regardless of that choice by a caring medical system, view what happened to Lesly Ramirez as unfathomable. El Salvador is a poor country with a reactionary government which has a lot to do with it but what excuse does the developed educated United States have for overturning a women’s right to choose on a federal level that could easily produce horror stories like this one.
Source: Resumen Latinoamericano – English