Frost-Claw at your service with more worldwide wickedness. Was in chat with Andy when the subject of the recent atrocities in El Salvador came up. No, not those atrocities, but the ones now being perpetrated by the El Salvadoran government against women. Women who have had the misfortune to be raped, have an ectopic pregnancy or simply be saddled with an inconvenient fetus. Who choose abortion as a solution. In El Salvador, thanks to the most right-winged of Archbishops and charter member of Opus Dei (cue Dan Brown slavering in the background), abortion is illegal. As in, eight year jail sentance for the mother and maybe twice that for the doctor or back ally granny. Assuming of course, the woman survives the ordeal (many do not).
A look at this harrowing article in the NY Times (you don’t have to log in) will be most edifying. And while Roe-vs-Wade is teetering precariously atop the mountain of steaming spucatum tauri continually grunted out by the right-wing American Vagina Police, at least for the time being, we still do have it. Read on my pretties, and take care to keep your cunts north of the border…
Salient Paragraphs: Today, Article 1 of El Salvador’s constitution declares that the prime directive of government is to protect life from the “very moment of conception.” The penal code detailing the Crimes Against the Life of Human Beings in the First Stages of Development provides stiff penalties: the abortion provider, whether a medical doctor or a back-alley practitioner, faces 6 to 12 years in prison. The woman herself can get 2 to 8 years. Anyone who helps her can get 2 to 5 years. Additionally, judges have ruled that if the fetus was viable, a charge of aggravated homicide can be brought, and the penalty for the woman can be 30 to 50 years in prison…
“Back-alley abortion” is a term that has long been part of the abortion debate. In the United States, in the years since Roe v. Wade, it has come to seem metaphorical, perhaps even hyperbolic, but it happens to conjure precisely D.C.’s experience. And it’s easy in El Salvador to find plenty of evidence that D.C.’s story is neither isolated nor the worst case. A report by the Center for Reproductive Rights offers this grim list of tools used in clandestine abortions: “clothes hangers, iron bars, high doses of contraceptives, fertilizers, gastritis remedies, soapy water and caustic agents (such as car battery acid).” That list is meant to disgust a reader in the same way that imagery of mangled fetuses is meant to when employed by those who oppose abortion. But the criminalization of abortion in the modern age, in El Salvador at least, is not so simple as a grim return to the back alley. For the most part, the new law has not resulted in a spike in horror stories of painful and botched clandestine procedures.
To begin with, when a woman might face jail time for an abortion, she’s less likely to discuss her pregnancy at all. According to a study on attempted suicide and teen pregnancy published last year by academics at the University of El Salvador, some girls who poison their wombs with agricultural pesticide (its efficacy being a Salvadoran urban legend) would rather report the cause of their resulting hospital visit as “attempted suicide,” which is not as felonious a crime nor as socially unbearable as abortion. “They don’t want to be interviewed about abortion,” Irma Elizabeth Asencio, one of the study’s authors, explained to me. “They know they have committed a crime.”
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