Why A Teenage Mom Was Jailed In El Salvador After A Stillbirth

John W. Poole and Jason Beaubien/NPR YouTube

Editor's note: This story was originally published on September 22, 2014, but is newly relevant after Donald Trump's remark yesterday that if abortion is made illegal, women who have the procedure should be punished. He subsequently retracted the comment. But the idea of punishing women who've had an illegal abortion isn't so far-fetched in some parts of the world.

The story's co-author, Jason Beaubien, writes: In El Salvador and several other Latin American countries abortion is illegal, including in cases of rape. But it doesn't appear to stop women and girls from seeking the procedure.

In San Salvador, there is still a bustling trade in misoprostol, a drug that will terminate an early term pregnancy. Vendors in the market sell herb concoctions that claim to do the same. Informal networks link women with gynecologists who will perform abortions on the sly. Salvadorans who can afford it fly to Miami for the procedure.

Groups that favor abortion rights say the criminalization of abortion pushes it into the shadows and makes a simple medical procedure far more dangerous for women. Doctors complain that it forces them to report women suspected of having terminated their pregnancies to the police.

This story I produced with John Poole looks at one other side of this story: What happens if someone is falsely convicted of having an abortion?



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Christina Quintanilla's nightmare with El Salvador's abortion law began on Oct. 26, 2004.

Quintanilla was 17 at the time, and seven months pregnant with her second child. She was living in her mother's apartment, and that night, she couldn't get comfortable. Her belly was bulging, her back was aching, and her stomach was upset.

"I felt — I don't how to describe it — a pain, a terrible pain," she says through a translator. "And then I felt like I couldn't breathe, like I was drowning."

Quintanilla says she went into labor but soon passed out. The next thing she remembered was her mom picking her up from a pool of blood on the bathroom floor.

Both she and her mother, Carmen, say the baby was stillborn.

No one came after Carmen called 911, so a neighbor sent Quintanilla to the public hospital. When she woke up, it wasn't doctors who greeted her but criminal investigators. They had come to arrest her on charges of murdering her child.

"I was shocked by what he had said," she recalls. "I didn't have any words. I couldn't say anything."

Latin America has some of the most restrictive abortion laws in the world, with some exceptions for rape cases or if the mother's health is in danger.

But abortion is completely banned in El Salvador. The law recognizes a fetus as a human being from the moment of conception. In a high-profile case last year of a pregnant woman with lupus, the Salvadoran Supreme Court refused to allow her an abortion despite her doctors saying carrying the baby to term could endanger her life.

A woman accused of terminating a pregnancy in El Salvador can face up to 50 years in prison.

The law also requires doctors, nurses and other medical professionals to report suspected abortions.

In Quintanilla's case, an anonymous hospital worker had called the police and accused Quintanilla of having an abortion. As a result, she was dragged into a court case that lasted almost 12 months.

She and her family members say they'd been eagerly awaiting the birth of her second child. They'd even had a baby shower for her. Quintanilla says emphatically that she did not kill her baby.

The hospital had found no evidence that she had intentionally aborted the pregnancy. But the district attorney pushed forward anyway, arguing that Quintanilla had terminated the pregnancy because she couldn't support another child.

During the trial, Quintanilla says, her public defender was awful and couldn't even remember her name.

In the end, she was sentenced to 30 years in prison. She served four years before a young lawyer stumbled across her case and managed to get her sentence overturned. He argued successfully that no one ever established the cause of her baby's death.

Quintanilla is now back in her home in the eastern city of San Miguel. She lives with her 11-year-old son, Daniel, and her daughter, Alexandra, who was born after she was released from prison. Three-year-old Alexandra is a whirlwind of energy, and they simply call her "la reina," or the queen. Quintanilla says her life, post-prison, is peaceful.

"I look after my children and my family. I help out my relatives," she says. "I end up with a little extra money, and that's the good life I now have."

This story was part of a series looking at the health implications of abortions in developing countries.

