A 21-year-old mother in El Salvador will spend 50 years in prison for aggravated homicide after authorities claimed she killed her newborn daughter after giving birth.
On the night of June 17, 2020, Lesly Ramírez, who was 19 years old and five months pregnant at the time, unexpectedly delivered the unborn child in her outhouse bathroom.
Morena Herrera, head of the Citizen Group for the Decriminalization of Abortion, a feminist non-governmental organization that defended the woman, told Reuters that Ramírez had tried to cut the umbilical cord herself after the miscarriage, but her home had no electricity and it was dark.
Ramirez was rushed to San Juan de Dios Hospital in the western department of San Miguel, where she underwent treatment.
A week later she was placed in pre-trial detention during a court hearing, which she could not attend because of her ailing health.
"It is not the first time that the prosecution has constructed a story that totally criminalizes women," Herrera said, the Dailymail reported.
Salvadoran authorities, however, claimed that Ramírez carried her baby to near-full term and that after the delivery, she stabbed her daughter in the neck six times.
Ramírez was sentenced to 50 years in prison for aggravated homicide last week
Herrera and her NGO plans to appeal the court's “one-sided” verdict.
"The legal process against Lesly was full of irregularities and prejudices, in that sense the defense requested to annul the investigation stage because the judge did not admit the incorporation of evidence that demonstrated his innocence, for example, he did not value the social medicine expert opinion evidence of the gender violence to which she had been subjected," Citizen Group for the Decriminalization of Abortion said in a statement.
El Salvador along with Honduras, Nicaragua, and the Dominican Republic, are the only countries in Latin America that outlaw abortion without any exceptions.
"Any woman who arrives to jail accused of having an abortion is seen as the most evil, heartless being," Teodora del Carmen Vásquez, an El Salvador woman who ended up serving more than 10 years after being accused of killing her stillborn.
"From the moment we get pregnant, we become incubators," Vásquez told the Associated Press. "We lose our rights because the only possibility that we have of a life is taking care of the product inside us. It’s violence against us."
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