Aborto num país em que é sempre crime de homicídio

Em S. Salvador o aborto é completamente proibido. Este artigo de Jack Hitt no The New York Times é um murro no estomago.

Excertos:

In El Salvador, the law is clear: the woman is a felon and must be prosecuted.

Indeed, the evidence suggests that the ban in El Salvador disproportionately affects poor women.

As they do in any investigation, the police collect evidence by interviewing everyone who knows the accused and by seizing her medical records. But they must also visit the scene of the crime, which, following the logic of the law, often means the woman's vagina.

"Many doctors are afraid not to report," says Mira, the obstetrician I spoke to. This fear is heightened for doctors, she explains, by the fact that nurses also have a legal duty to report abortion crimes but are often confused about their obligation of confidentiality. So doctors are afraid that the nurses will report them for not reporting. "The entire system is run on fear," Mira said.

A policy that criminalizes all abortions has a flip side. It appears to mandate that the full force of the medical team must tend toward saving the fetus under any circumstances. This notion can lead to some dangerous practices. Consider an ectopic pregnancy (...) According to Sara Valdés, the director of the Hospital de Maternidad, women coming to her hospital with ectopic pregnancies cannot be operated on until fetal death or a rupture of the fallopian tube. "That is our policy," Valdés told me. She was plainly in torment about the subject.

I was there to see Carmen Climaco. She is now 26 years old, four years into her 30-year sentence. She has three children, who today are 11, 8 and 6 years old. We talked about them for a while. Since she was the only person in the family who worked, her children's financial situation is precarious; they now stay with their grandmother. Climaco said she lives for their visits, which are brief and come only twice a month. (...) "I became pregnant at a time when my smallest child was in the hospital," she said. "I never thought I could get pregnant because I had been sterilized. Suddenly I saw two doors shutting at the same time. There was nothing I could do. My mother said she'd toss me out of the house if I got pregnant."