When I met 18-year-old Evelyn outside her cell at Ilopango women’s prison, she looked young, vulnerable and closer to 14-years-old.
Evelyn is the youngest woman in El Salvador to be charged with homicide for aborting her baby – an accusation she denies. She’s been in prison for seven months awaiting trial and is under constant threat, telling me that upon entering prison, other inmates told her women accused of abortion were sometimes killed in jail – due to widely held views in El Salvador that all life is sacred, and abortion is murder.
Rather than having space to process the trauma of losing her baby, Evelyn, a devout Catholic, must endure a daily life of uncertainty, waiting on a trial and not knowing when it will come.
El Salvador is a country where more than 125 women have been prosecuted under extreme anti-abortion laws since they were adopted in the late-1990s. Most of these women claim they are innocent and suffered late-term miscarriages, but they’re not always believed.
This is a country which amended its national constitution in 1999 to recognise human life from the moment of conception.
As we flew to El Salvador, I thought of how I would respond if my own daughters faced forty years in jail for a medical emergency, how I would feel if I found them in a hospital ward after heavy bleeding from a miscarriage – only to be surrounded by police officers and handcuffed to their bed, before being charged with murder and jailed, then waiting for a year to even have their case heard. I was horrified by the thought of being unable to protect my daughters from the full force of an inflexible law, used against women already suffering from an extreme medical emergency.
As a father, it’s inconceivable.
What I found in El Salvador was several stories of terrible injustice against already vulnerable and mostly poor women, who had already suffered a great trauma.
As we started meeting women, mothers, lawyers and social workers involved in these cases, the first thing that struck me was how friendly, eloquent and dignified everyone seemed to be.
Evelyn’s mother Maria-Josefina Hernandez explained in detail how on the night of her miscarriage, Evelyn started bleeding and fell unconscious. The family did not know she was pregnant. They took her to hospital and upon arrival doctors reported her as an alleged abortion case. Later, a state prosecutor went to the family’s house, found the foetus in the outhouse latrine. Evelyn was charged with murder and taken to jail, five days after she reported to hospital.
This is where the problem seems to lie with El Salvador’s law. Fear of the law and ignorance concerning their right to professional secrecy means doctors misinterpret and misapply the law in cases of obstetric complications. What is spontaneous is reported as intentional and then it falls to a dysfunctional and protracted court system to try to find proof of guilt.
Walking into the prison was immediately intimidating.
Rather than a woman being innocent until proven guilty, under the abortion law in El Salvador, it appears to work the other way around.
We wanted to meet Maria-Josefina at the family’s home, but were told criminal gangs who controlled the area would make a visit too dangerous for the family. Evelyn had fallen pregnant after she was forced to have sex with a local gang member who had told her he would use violence against her – and her family – if she refused.
In El Salvador, threats from gangs are extremely serious. They not only kill each other for territory, they use threats of real violence to extort citizens and businesses, keep control of who enters certain areas, demand payments for ‘rent’ and, as we were discovering, used violence to ‘choose’ teenage girls they want to have sex with. Families in these areas are powerless.
We also struggled to meet Evelyn in the women’s prison. After weeks of negotiations prison officials kept making new conditions and demanding small changes to our letter of application – it was clear they were trying to find ways to refuse us access.
Eventually they said we should apply through the Women’s Collective, a group working tirelessly to help women accused of abortion-related homicide. We did so and were eventually granted access, but not with a camera.
Dateline reporter Evan Williams interviews Elizabeth Santos, who is awaiting trial on abortion charges. Source: SBS Dateline
Walking into the prison was immediately intimidating. Most inmates looked pretty rough – some of the older women were tough and unfriendly.
I thought of my own girls having to spend even one day at such risk in jail for something they could not control and should not be punished for.
El Salvador is a beautiful country with friendly people. But women are being caught between endemic gang violence and a conservative Catholic interpretation of the law. It has to change before more traumatised, powerless, poor young women are jailed and their lives destroyed.
Evelyn now lives in a cell with 200 other women terrified that someone will discover her charge. She is on remand here until her hearing in December. When we asked what she would like to do when she gets out, she said she wanted to go to the church and just be with her family.
She just wants the nightmare to end.
