Court in El Salvador Will Not Overturn Woman's 30-Year Jail Sentence Over Stillbirth
LatestA 37-year-old woman in El Salvador has spent the last decade in prison on an aggravated homicide charge after suffering what she said was a stillbirth. Though Amnesty International was in court this week attempting to appeal the rest of her 30-year jail term, on Thursday the court upheld that sentence.
HuffPost reports that in 2007, a then-pregnant Teodora del Carmen Vásquez reportedly fainted at work, waking up to find that she had suffered a stillbirth and lost her baby. But in El Salvador, where there’s been a total ban on abortion since 1998, women who have miscarriages and stillbirths are often subject to criminal charges and trumped up prison sentences, and Vásquez was arrested and charged with committing an illegal abortion via miscarriage. She was convicted in 2008.