Punitive anti-abortion laws in El Salvador, which have resulted in women and girls serving long prison sentences and seen child rape victims forced to carry their pregnancies to term, are "strikingly similar" to the abortion regime in Ireland, the executive director of Amnesty International Ireland has said.
Colm O'Gorman, speaking to The Irish Times from the Central American country, said "El Salvador is a harsh example of what would happen in Ireland if we didn't have the safety valve of England. "
He was speaking as Amnesty International publishes a report on El Salvador’s complete ban on abortion, as part of its “My Body, My Rights” campaign.
The report, On The Brink of Death, Violence Against Women and the Abortion Ban in El Salvador is the second of a series of five reports being issued by the human rights charity over the course of the campaign, which aims to raise awareness among young people in particular about their right to make decisions about their health, body, sexuality and reproduction without state control, coercion or discrimination.
As part of the campaign, a report on Ireland’s abortion regime will be published in May next year.
A first report has been issued on Nepal. A third will be published in February on Burkino Faso. The fourth will be on Ireland and the final report, on Magreb, to be published next June.
Abortion was made illegal in all circumstances in El Salvador, even where the life of the mother is at risk, in 1998.
Its introduction, says the report, "was heavily influenced by patriarchal and conservative forces including the Catholic Church hierarchy".
Even in the cases of ectopic pregnancy, the woman’s condition must deteriorate to the point where she is haemorrhaging and she is on the brink of dying, before doctors can intervene.
The ban has seen women imprisoned after miscarriages on suspicion of having procured an abortion, and has given rise to such high-profile cases as that last year where the Salvadoran Supreme Court denied an abortion to a seriously ill 22 year-old woman.
Known as Beatriz, she had a chronic immune disorder called lupus and kidney failure and was refused an abortion despite the fact her unborn infant had anencephaly.
A medical committee at her maternity hospital, the Ministry of Health and human rights groups had all supported Beatriz’s request to terminate her pregnancy, but judges at the Supreme Court voted four-to-one to reject her request. The baby was delivered in June last year by Caesarean section and died hours later.
Mr O’Gorman, who met Beatriz earlier this week, described her as “very private, very shy”.
He had been struck by the impact the laws had had one her.
“She had to go before the world to beg for a medical intervention to save her health and arguably her life. She did that because she has another child and she fought so she could live, for him, for her existing child. It is outrageous what she was put through. And if she had lived in Ireland, because she is poor and probably wouldn’t have been able to afford to go to England, she probably would have been put through the same ordeal,” Mr O’ Gorman said.
A psychiatrist who works with teenage rape victims, interviewed for the report, is quoted.
“We already know what a devastating effect it has on a woman, to have to carry to term an unwanted pregnancy which is as a result of rape. But for an adolescent? It’s even more devastating. It’s torture. Obliging an adolescent to carry on with such a pregnancy is torture, because it means exposing a girl to all the changes that come with pregnancy, feeling the baby move and there constantly remembering what happened to her…we are torturing them.”
The report also highlighted the incidence of clandestine abortions, suicides linked to crisis pregnancies, the criminalisation of women who have had miscarriages and the winder impact of the ban on abortion on women’s and girls’ families and Salvadoran society.
Case study:
One doctor interviewed told of treating a nine year-old rape survivor.
“We had a nine year-old girl here. She gave birth aged 10. She had been abused since infancy. She fell pregnant and… it was a very difficult case. Very difficult…it ended up being a Caesarean section at 32 weeks…That case marked us a lot perhaps because she didn’t understand what was happening to her…She asked us for colouring pencils. Crayons. 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 little girl’. And in the end she didn’t understand that she was expecting.”
To see the full report click here.
