Editor’s Note: This podcast episode was produced by Latino USA and co-published in partnership with El Faro English.
On a hot San Salvador day, Teodora Vázquez called 911 for an ambulance. She was nine months pregnant, alone at work, and in labor. After multiple phone calls for help, no one arrived. With no medical care, she gave birth, fell unconscious, and began hemorrhaging in a bathroom stall. Shortly after, the police came. To her surprise, they weren’t there to help her, but placed her under arrest for what they decided was the abortion and murder of her newborn. Teodora would then be convicted of homicide and sentenced to 30 years in prison.
Since 1997, El Salvador has had a no-exceptions ban on abortion. This means that there are no exceptions for women seeking an abortion after rape, incest, or when their life is in danger. Termination of pregnancy is never allowed; instead, it’s criminalized. Medical professionals can be incarcerated for up to 12 years for assisting or performing an abortion, and pregnant women have been sentenced to up to 50 years in prison for what the government has defined as an abortion and homicide.
Nearly 200 women have been incarcerated after having an obstetric emergency, like miscarriage or stillbirth, in the last 26 years.
In this episode, Maria Hinojosa and producer Monica Morales-Garcia travel to El Salvador to speak with women who have faced El Salvador’s anti-abortion laws, including Teodora. They also speak with leaders in the feminist movement who are fighting to free incarcerated women, and get in touch with a leader of the anti-abortion movement… with close ties to the US.
Through interviews, documents, and archival materials, this investigation paints a clear and disturbing picture of the women who suffer most when a country stretches the definition of abortion beyond its meaning and then bans them all without exception.
You can read more about our investigation, including Maria Hinojosa’s reporter’s notebook and other articles, both in English and Spanish by visiting the Futuro Investigates website here.
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This story was produced by Monica Morales-Garcia. It was edited by Andrea López-Cruzado and our managing editor Fernanda Echavarri. It was mixed by Gabriela Baez. Fact checking by Roxana Aguirre.
Featured art by Diego Perdomo.
On this episode of Latino USA, you revealed the despicable anti-abortion policies of El Salvador, shaming that country. It is even more backward and regressive than the shameful American states that verge on doing the same thing. You connected the horror in El Salvador to the latest regressions of the United States.
These and other legal travesties are a tragedy of democracy. Anti-abortion cannot win on its own. Nor can every gun for everyone. Or racism, anti-poor, anti-immigrant, anti-gay, misogyny, or outright sadism. But supporting and enacting each of these policies earns money from very loud wrong-minded wrong-headed minority-position organizations and buys the votes of SINGLE-ISSUE VOTERS. Taking all the wrong minority positions adds up to a near majority! That is what the Republican Party has been doing, eagerly inflicting multiple wrong polices on everyone, all to buy power and what it brings.
• Eisenhower purged gays from Civil Service.
• Nixon picked up racism after Kennedy and Johnson committed the Democrats against it. (“The forgotten American”. The Southern Strategy.)
• Reagan picked up anti-abortion (but didn’t follow through, so that the Republicans could use it again). The Republicans STOKED anti-abortion. Reagan picked up anti-poor and racism (the mythical Black “welfare queen”).
• George H W Bush … stayed the course, did nothing about energy.
• George W Bush picked up “good versus evil” and anti-atheism.
• Trump picked up anti-immigrant, white supremacy, anti-gay, anti-poor, every gun for everyone, misogyny, greed, vanity, and sadism.