Morena Herrara. Photo: R Sura/EPA-EFE/Rex
In El Salvador, abortion can be punished by up to eight years in prison, and women can even be charged with aggravated homicide, which carries a sentence of up to 50 years in prison. Many women have also been jailed for miscarriages for many years.
Earlier this year, Morena Herrera woke up to find that a video about her had been posted on social media. It claimed that the 64-year-old campaigner for abortion rights in El Salvador had “chased down” a young woman in hospital and “terrorised” her into seeking an abortion. This is not the first time Herrera has been subjected to such an attack. “There have been videos of me on several occasions which tell the government to prosecute me,” she says. “There had already been a campaign saying that I traded in fetal organs – an absurd thing.” She has also been called an “enemy of the state”, a “colleague of terrorists” and a “feminazi”.
The young woman she had tried to help was Beatriz, who had been denied an abortion in 2013, even though she was seriously ill and the fetus would not have survived independently.
Beatriz died after being involved in a traffic accident in 2017, but all these years later her case is before judges at the Inter-American Court of Human Rights (IACHR) in Costa Rica, who could rule that El Salvador must decriminalise abortion. This could also set an important precedent in the region: across the Caribbean, South and Central America, where abortion is not permitted for any reason in seven countries.
Mariana Moisa, a women’s rights activist and founder of the Citizens’ Coalition for the Decriminalisation of Abortion, which campaigns for women convicted for having premature births and obstetric emergencies, says she is subjected to an increasing torrent of abuse every time she posts on social media. Her organisation’s website was the target of 13,000 cyber-attacks during the hearing of the landmark case of Manuela v. El Salvador at the IACHR in 2021.
The IACHR ruled that El Salvador violated the human rights of Manuela in December 2021. Nothing has changed yet but here is another chance!
SOURCE: Guardian, by Sarah Johnson 2 December 2024.