Across the globe, abortion remains a contentious political issue. Should it be legal? Heavily regulated? Entirely outlawed? There's no correlation between the legality of abortion and how common it is — areas of the world where abortion is largely illegal and contraception hard to come by see some of the highest abortion rates, while some of the countries with the lowest abortion rates also have liberal abortion laws and accessible, affordable contraception. Unsafe abortion rates are particularly high in countries where the procedure is outlawed. Another troubling outcome: When abortion is criminalized, women go to jail.
That's the case in El Salvador, where the laws against abortion are some of the strictest in the world, and where women's rights advocates say 17 women were unjustly imprisoned after experiencing miscarriage, stillbirth, and other obstetric complications, because the Salvadoran constitution declares that life begins at conception. Human rights campaigners are pushing for the women to be pardoned, saying they were convicted without sufficient evidence. The reproductive and sexual health organization RH Reality Check has started a petition urging U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry to put pressure of the president of El Salvador to issue the pardon.
According to Amnesty International, one of those 17 woman, Maria Teresa Rivera, didn't know she was pregnant and had a miscarriage; her mother-in-law found her bleeding on the bathroom floor and rushed her to the hospital. A hospital staff member reported her to the police, and since even fertilized eggs are protected "people" in El Salvador, the authorities conducted an investigation, and Rivera was tried and convicted of aggravated homicide. She is serving 40 years in prison.
In El Salvador, abortion is illegal under all circumstances, even when the pregnant woman isn't a woman at all but a girl, or when she's a rape or incest victim, or when her life or health is at risk. Amnesty International estimates that more than 1 out of every 10 women in that country who underwent illegal abortions died. Common methods of terminating a pregnancy, Amnesty says, include "ingesting rat poison or other pesticides, and thrusting knitting needles, pieces of wood and other sharp objects into the cervix, and the use of the ulcer treatment drug misoprostol, which has become widely used to induce abortions." The country also has the highest teen pregnancy rate in Latin America, and the combination of illegal abortion and stigma around teen pregnancy and sexual violence means pregnant teenage girls, many of them rape victims, commit suicidein large numbers. More than a third of maternal deaths are pregnant teenagers who kill themselves.
Other girls go on to give birth. One doctor told Amnesty about caring for a 9-year-old rape survivor who didn't understand what being pregnant meant and was nonetheless forced to carry to term.
"She asked us for colouring pencils. Crayons," he told the human rights organization. "And it broke all of our hearts because she started to draw us all, she drew and she stuck it on the wall. And we said: 'She's still just a girl, just a little girl.'"
Salil Shetty, secretary general of Amnesty International, called the treatment of women and girls in El Salvador "truly shocking and akin to torture."
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Jill Filipovic is a contributing writer for cosmopolitan.com. She is the author of OK Boomer, Let's Talk: How My Generation Got Left Behind and The H-Spot: The Feminist Pursuit of Happiness. A weekly CNN columnist and a contributing writer for the New York Times, she is also a lawyer.
