Pro life paradise?
El Salvador. This is the ideal that religious conservatives and the pro-life 'want to ban all abortions' crowd keep pushing down our collective throats.
It has one of the toughest anti-abortion laws in the world. The extent of which,
can be seen in the case of Beatriz:
There, a woman named Beatriz spent months languishing near death. Her kidneys were shutting down. She has lupus. She's 22 years old with an infant and a husband at home in rural El Salvador.
The problem? A high-risk pregnancy exacerbating her existing health conditions, with a fetus that was anencephalic - meaning it was developing with only a brainstem and no brain, and was unlikely to survive for more than a few hours outside of the womb, if at all.
For most thinking individuals, the answer to this solution, and the doctors recommendation is very clear. To save her life, she needed to have an abortion. Her child would never develop and would die, since it has no brain. Not so.
But El Salvador legally abides by the pro-life manifesto that abortion is murder, and is never medically necessary to save a woman's life. On May 29, the country's highest court agreed, denying Beatriz the procedure - ruling that her death "is not actual or imminent, but rather eventual".
To reiterate. The child had 0 chance of surviving. It had no brain. She was dying as a result of the pregnancy.
And yet, apparently an abortion in her case would be murder... The court even went further:
So since Beatriz would likely die in a few days or weeks instead of hours, it was acceptable to do nothing, the court said. Her declining health apparently wasn't much of a consideration, even though common sense (and modern medicine) confirm that long periods of grave illness typically do not lead to great health outcomes even if the patient survives.
For good measure, the court added that "the rights of the mother cannot be privileged over those" of the fetus. In the meantime, the rights of the fetus are very much privileged over those of the woman.
So, the life of a brainless baby who had absolutely no chance of surviving was privileged over those of the mother who was dying because of the pregnancy.
There is absolutely no sense with this case, but at its heart is the pro-life anti-abortion cause. For those who wish to ban abortions, this is reality and what can happen.
It took a human rights court to order the Government in El Salvador to give her life saving care and terminate the pregnancy. The Government was left with little choice but to allow the doctors to terminate the pregnancy. However they had final say and demanded the very sick woman undergo a c-section to deliver the child, further putting her life at risk. The child died a few hours later.
The insanity even extends to ectopic pregnancies, where the fertilised egg implants itself in the fallopian tube. Now, in normal circumstances, this requires an operation to remove it. Not so in pro-life hell of El Salvador. Oh no. There, even such medical procedures are banned and deemed to be murder.
The insistence on putting a woman's life at risk to maintain ideological purity is not relegated to C-section versus abortion decisions. For women with ectopic pregnancies, in which a fertilised egg implants outside of the uterus (often in the Fallopian tube), many Catholic hospitals are very bad places to be. Even though ectopic pregnancies can never come to fruition - a fetus can't develop in a Fallopian tube - modern Catholic dogma dictates that the fertilised egg cannot simply be removed.
That's a problem, since fertilised eggs grow and will eventually rupture the tube, creating a potentially life-threatening situation. At non-Catholic hospitals, a woman with an ectopic pregnancy could have it dissolved with a simple injection of methotrexate, but dissolving a fertilized egg is, to radical pro-lifers, murder. So for a woman getting Catholic medical care at many facilities, an ectopic pregnancy often means that her whole Fallopian tube has to be removed. The egg, of course, will die anyway as soon as the tube is cut off from the woman's body. But doctors didn't directly kill it, so its death is considered morally acceptable. Acceptable, too, is the fact that the woman's fertility has now been compromised, and she's had to undergo an invasive procedure instead of a readily available, simpler, safer one.
And this pro-life hell is not just in El Salvador. Other countries, such as Ireland and
Nicaragua have seen women die or denied cancer treatment because they are pregnant.
But lets look a
bit further in pro-life make all abortions illegal paradise.
Glenda Xiomara Cruz was crippled by abdominal pain and heavy bleeding in the early hours of 30 October 2012. The 19-year-old from Puerto El Triunfo, eastern El Salvador, went to the nearest public hospital where doctors said she had lost her baby.
It was the first she knew about the pregnancy as her menstrual cycle was unbroken, her weight practically unchanged, and a pregnancy test in May 2012 had been negative.
Four days later she was charged with aggravated murder - intentionally murdering the 38-to-42 week foetus - at a court hearing she was too sick to attend. The hospital had reported her to the police for a suspected abortion.
After two emergency operations and three weeks in hospital she was moved to Ilopango women's prison on the outskirts of the capital San Salvador. Then last month she was sentenced to 10 years in jail, the judge ruling that she should have saved the baby's life.
El Salvador is one of five countries with a total ban on abortion, along with Nicaragua, Chile, Honduras and Dominican Republic. Since 1998, the law has allowed no exceptions - even if a woman is raped, her life is at risk or the foetus is severely deformed.
More than 200 women were reported to the police between 2000 and 2011, of whom 129 were prosecuted and 49 convicted - 26 for murder (with sentences of 12 to 35 years) and 23 for abortion, according to research by Citizens' Group for the Decriminalization of Abortion. Seven more have been convicted since 2012.
Last year when Maria Teresa Rivera suffered a miscarriage, she was sentenced to 40 years in jail for aggravated murder.
Like Xiomara, Teresa, 28, had no pregnancy symptoms before sudden severe pain and bleeding, and was reported to police by the public hospital where she had sought emergency help.
The scientific evidence was flimsy, according to Munoz who will soon lodge an appeal, and the prosecution relied heavily on a colleague of hers, who testified that Rivera had said she "might be" pregnant a full 11 months before the miscarriage.
A textile factory worker, she was the family's only breadwinner and her eight-year-old son is now living in dire poverty with his grandmother.
Cristina Quintanilla's story is different. On 24 October 2004, the 18-year-old from rural San Miguel was seven months pregnant with her second child, living with her mother in the capital to be near a hospital for the birth.
Her boyfriend was working in the US, but the couple were excited, buying baby clothes and saving food tokens.
"Around midnight I felt an immense pain, I thought I was dying," Quintanilla says.
"I was banging on the bathroom door to get my mum's attention when I felt the baby drop out. The next thing I remember is waking up in hospital."
Her mother called the police - a typical step for Salvadorans in an emergency, who took them to hospital.
Quintanilla was given an anaesthetic, and interrogated when she came round. Then she was handcuffed to the hospital bed, charged with manslaughter and transferred to a police cell.
The first judge dismissed the case, but the prosecution appealed, upgrading the charge to aggravated murder.
Quintanilla was found guilty and sentenced to 30 years in jail, where she was vilified as a child killer. Her son Daniel, then only four, spent four years living with his great-grandmother until Munoz succeeded in having the sentence reduced to three years.
"The medical reports couldn't explain why the baby died, but the prosecutor made me out to be a criminal who could have saved my baby even though I had passed out in pain," she says.
So when I see the likes of LG parading Ms Jessen in this and other abortion threads, I wonder about the insanity of banning abortions. I wonder how Ms Jessen would appreciate, with her medical condition, if she fell pregnant and needed urgent medical care, she was told 'sorry, but you're pregnant and you're just going to have to die because you no longer have privilege over your body'.. Would she say thank you?
