El Salvador Pardons Woman Jailed for Miscarriage

Women from feminist organizations protest El Salvador's abortion laws outside the Supreme Court in San Salvador, El Salvador, April 22, 2013. | Photo: EFE

Sonia Tabora, who was convicted of aggravated homicide after a court ruled she induced an abortion in 2005, was officially declared innocent by a Salvadoran court.

At the age of 20, when Tabora was 7-months pregnant, she began to feel abdominal pains. She gave premature labor in a coffee field near her home and lost consciousness. The baby was either stillborn or died shortly after childbirth.

Tabora’s family found her bleeding and took her to a health center, where a doctor then called the police after suspecting that she induced an abortion.

In 2005, Tabora was convicted to 30 years in prison, and served seven years of her sentence in which she reportedly suffered depression. She was released in 2012, but it was not until the recent ruling that the saga finally ended for Tabora. In 2014, a court opened a second review into her case, which was finally settled when a court ruled that she was innocent this week.

El Salvador has some of the strictest abortion laws in the world and has jailed multiple women on the grounds that they induced an abortion. In Tabora’s case, scientific evidence was never presented to a court to show that she had induced an abortion, rather than miscarry because of other health complications.

Abortion was previously legal in El Salvador under limited circumstances, but in 1998, the Central American country criminalized abortion in all circumstances, even when it is necessary to save a woman’s life.

Human rights activists have long criticized El Salvador’s abortion laws, which put women’s health in danger and criminalize women who experience complications during their pregnancies.

Salvadoran Congress has shown some indications of possible change. In October 2016, El Salvador's governing leftist party presented a proposal to Congress to allow abortion in cases of rape or risky pregnancy, offering a ray of hope to abortion advocates in the nation.

The proposal, presented by the Farabundo Martin National Liberation Front, would allow abortion in cases of rape or sex-trafficking, when the woman's life is in danger or when the fetus is so deformed that it makes life unviable.

There are at least 14 women in El Salvador who have been sentenced to prison terms of 12 years or more for abortion and about 130 currently facing legal proceedings, according to the Citizens Association for the Decriminalization of Abortion. Under Salvadoran law, doctors must report cases of women who they suspect of having induced an abortion.

Abortion remains controversial and is punished in several countries around the world. However, only four countries in Latin America (Chile, Dominican Republic, El Salvador, and Nicaragua) ban the procedure entirely.

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