El Salvador mulls freeing 17 women jailed for abortion crimes

[Judi Lynn]

Source: Reuters

El Salvador mulls freeing 17 women jailed for abortion crimes
Source: Thomson Reuters Foundation - Thu, 15 May 2014 07:07 AM

BOGOTA (Thomson Reuters Foundation) - Guadalupe was hunched over with abdominal pain and heavy bleeding one afternoon in October 2007.

The 18-year-old domestic worker went to a public hospital in El Salvador’s capital San Salvador where she went into premature labour. Her baby died.

A year later, another young woman, 22-year-old Salvadora, got pregnant as a result of rape. She gave birth at home. Her baby was stillborn.

In both cases, hospital staff went to police and accused the two women of inducing abortions. Police interrogated the women while they still lay recovering in their hospital beds.

Read more: http://www.trust.org/item/20140515070722-xav1r/

[StevieM]

1. This is the GOP's dream for America in the future. (eom)

[theHandpuppet]

4. Yes -- and that's no joke

But getting folks interested in reproduction rights is tough, even here on DU.

[StevieM]

5. The American people have a hard time understading what the true GOP position is.

Their position is as follows: No sex outside of marriage; if people do have pre-marital sex, then we should make it difficult to get contraception, which exempts people from "consequences" for their actions; and all children born out of wedlock should be given up for adoption--Republicans support a 100% relinquishment rate.

Until people understand what the GOP believes in, it will be hard to get them more interested.

[Comrade Grumpy]

2. This is horrible policy. Free those women!

[MisterP]

3. it's actually a rich and intriguing issue in Latin America

the Salvadoran students' union called it "preemptive genocide" (reducing the number of the poor--and preventing The Revolution from happening by reducing misery) and Honduras's 70s Communist Youth were the ones beating up any doctor who talked about contraception on the National University's campus and cancelling even demographics from the curriculum ("We've convinced them that to carry out such a program is to act against the nation. ... The Medical School will never allow a plan of North American penetration to be carried out in its name!&quot ; Salvadoran editors (pre-Humanæ Vitæ) opined that Central America "should think of birth control only after it has twice the population of England or France. At one point he speaks of Central America's resources being sufficient for a population ten times its present size" and the Hondurans' belief 1970 was " If we would have had more people, El Salvador would not have dared to invade us" 1969: 75% of intelligentsia and 60% of students in Honduras thought that a doubled or tripled population was needed to end poverty; Planned Parenthood's job was seen as "assuring the domination of western civilization" by keeping foreigners in control of the Third World: the First World feared "that their prestige and power positions might be threatened if our countries grow too fast"; one French-educated Honduran atheist said that "A situation now favorable to the U.S. will no longer be so once Latin America triples its present population," and leftists were likelier to oppose family planning if irreligious (39% right pro-planning vs. 29% left): 24% of the right denied that growth increased poverty, as opposed to 50% of the far left (Axel Mundigo); in the 80s it was the decidedly un-religious (but very male-dominated) human-rights orgs opposing legalizing abortion way more than the Archdiocese in the newspapers

it's not that new either: 20s France was the only European country to see its population fall, so abortionists were outlawed and called national traitors there, too

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/a/a5/Abortion_Laws.svg

[Comrade Grumpy]

6. Thank you. Bizarrely fascinating stuff.

[freshwest]

7. That's Pat Buchanan's argument with a twist. I hear you. Thanks for that. n/t

[Judi Lynn]

8. Wow. This information will take some time to absorb. Never even knew about it.

It means that the Church (and Evangelistic Christian churches) can use the citizens' own awareness of their own history at the hands of Western power to bond with the people and be seen as more protective of their needs, if I'm reading it correctly.

Clearly we will have to remind ourselves there are other prevailing aspects which attend this subject for Central America, at least.

You have done us a favor by adding some real light here where we had nothing.

[MisterP]

9. it's a very complex play: US technocrats (sometimes even tricking people into getting

sterilized), "Third-Worldist" technocrats (Nehru, Mao, Ceaușescu, Echeverría, French-educated Central Americans and Argentineans), women's groups fighting for abortion pointing out that importing a French ideology is no more valid than importing a US one
by the 70s one-FIFTH of El Salvador's poor women were getting illegal abortions every year: not one-fifth had had, one-fifth GETTING
it's a big interlocking circle (much like how nature and nurture, or ranching and subsistence farming are more two dimensions of a square than "factor A vs. factor B&quot

[Judi Lynn]

10. The pattern is becoming clearer and clearer, now. Peru sterilized poor women.

They apparently had NO choice whatsoever, when the government had them in its sights.

This article is from earlier this year, but it has made it to D.U. several years ago, when D.U.'er "rabs" was here who had personal awareness of it since he was in South America a lot. He was horrified and sickened about it, and wrote about it in his posts at D.U.

Here's a recent article:

Forced sterilization and impunity in Peru
Mariella Sala 10 February 2014

Between 1995-2000, 300,000 women in Peru, mostly poor indigenous peasants who did not speak Spanish, were forcibly sterilized by the Fujimori government. The Peruvian feminist movement has been trying to bring Fujimori and his officials to trial for this crime against humanity ever since. Last month the case was thrown out for a second time.

[center]~~~~~[/center]
In 1995, then-President Alberto Fujimori met with Peruvian feminists at the UN Women’s Conference in Beijing and announced he would liberalize Peru’s strict laws on contraception by allowing women to have their tubes tied without getting their husbands’ permission. For Peruvian feminists, who had been fighting for more reproductive rights against powerful opposition from the Catholic Church and Opus Dei, this was a victory. They had no idea that the Fujimori government would use the new law to forcibly sterilize three hundred thousand indigenous women in the Andes between 1995 - 2000.

There are many historical instances of forced sterilization, which is currently being practised on HIV-positive women in Namibia, for purposes of population control in Uzbekistan, and against the Roma in the Czech Republic and Slovakia. It is among the offenses listed as crimes against humanity by the Rome Statute of 2005: “Rape, sexual slavery, enforced prostitution, forced pregnancy, enforced sterilization, or any other form of sexual violence of comparable gravity.”

In the case of Peru, because most of the peasant women who were sterilized only spoke Quechua or Aymara, and many of them did not know how to name what had happened to their bodies even in their own language, it took a while for the story to reach women’s human rights advocates in Lima. In 1996, Giulia Tamayo from CLADEM, a Latin American feminist lawyers’ network, began investigating the crime and in 1999 she published a report, Nada Personal – A human’s right report about how the sterilization program has injured thousands of women. At the same time Hilaria Supa, an indigenous leader of the peasant women’s federation in the district of Anta, began to work with MAM Fundacional (Movimiento Amplio de Mujeres) and CLADEM to investigate the issue. Supa, who is fluent in both Spanish and Quechua, discovered that hundreds of women in her community had been sterilized against their wills, and founded the Asociación de Mujeres Afectadas por las Esterilizaciones Forzadas de Anta (AMAEF), organizing survivors from the communities and districts of Anta and Cusco.

They were eventually able to gather testimony documenting 2047 forced sterilizations, most of which took place between1996 -1998. CLADEM found that, in most Andean communities, the Government Health Service had rounded up all the women with children and sterilized them without their consent. Some had died and a huge number had suffered adverse health consequences, their lives devastated. These sterilizations were carried out by a program ironically called Voluntary Surgical Contraception Program, under which physicians were given monthly sterilization quotas and health workers were trained to “capture” as many women for sterilization as possible.

More:
http://www.opendemocracy.net/5050/mariella-sala/forced-sterilization-and-impunity-in-peru

[center]~ ~ ~[/center]
This needs deeper understanding than it would seem at first reading.

Thank you for your insights.

[MisterP]

11. and that's why the LA women's movement is so important--resisting both forcible

sterilization (especially on ethnic grounds) and "breed for the republic" perspectives alike

(and thanks also for not saying I'm a Jesuit agent!)

[Judi Lynn]

13. Ha! I stifled it! You moved us to realize what is actually going on.

You're so right in suggesting we understand the way the situation is being played politically in the strangest way we would have never expected.

Unexpected, and bizarre. Just as you described it.

[MisterP]

15. 's the occupational hazard of the historian: you give your findings and some of the context you use

analyze it, and everyone yells "Commie! Papist! Lacanian!"

[joshcryer]

12. I see nothing "rich and intriguing" about controlling womens bodies.

Sometimes the west does have good ideas and allowing women control over their bodies is one of them.

[geek tragedy]

14. A confluence of authoritarian ideologies.

With the common ground being men believing they own women's bodies.

Like something a leftwing Alan Keyes would argue.