From Jacarandas, we submitted a letter to the Inter-American Court of Human Rights (Inter-American Court of Human Rights) in the Beatriz case to insist on the urgency and need for abortion to be decriminalized in El Salvador. In this paper, we present the international standards and recommendations of different bodies of the Universal System and the Inter-American System of Human Rights on the consequences of the absolute criminalization of abortion in El Salvador.
This situation results in many women resorting to dangerous and even deadly practices and abstaining from requiring medical services when they have obstetric emergencies out of fear of going to prison.
Beatriz was a 22-year-old Salvadoran woman living in poverty and became pregnant for the second time in 2013. The doctors recommended that Beatriz perform a therapeutic abortion because of her autoimmune disease, her life and health were at risk. In addition, the fetus came with a malformation that made it incompatible with extrauterine life. However, the law prevented doctors from performing abortions.
Beatriz's health continued to deteriorate and her defense sought protection before the Constitutional Chamber of the Supreme Court of Justice of El Salvador, but there was no timely procedure there. In turn, several organizations presented the case to the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights and interim measures were issued to carry out the recommended medical treatment. Meanwhile, Beatriz's health worsened and the authorities failed to comply with the ordered precautionary measures. For this reason, the Inter-American Court intervened and ordered the State to take the necessary measures to allow medical treatment.
On June 3, 2013, the Government allowed an early C-section to be performed on Beatriz, who was already after the 20th week of pregnancy, when the termination of the pregnancy was not medically considered an abortion, but rather an induced birth. As expected, the baby died hours after delivery. Years later, Beatriz died as a result of complications in her state of health following a traffic accident.
Beatriz's case represents the physical and mental torture experienced by women in El Salvador because they face a discriminatory landscape that absolutely prohibits abortion, even in cases where their lives and health are at risk. This shows how these types of systems ignore the lives and reality of many women in which, in addition, several factors of vulnerability converge.
For these reasons, Jacarandas insists on El Salvador's multiple international obligations, taking into account that the total criminalization of abortion goes against the fundamental rights of women and pregnant people. We also point out that it is necessary to order guarantees of non-repetition, highlighting the judicial role played by high courts in Latin America for the decriminalization of abortion, and for this reason we describe the cases of Colombia, Mexico and Ecuador.
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