In 2013 a young woman, Beatriz had been denied an abortion, even though she was seriously ill and the foetus would not have survived outside the uterus. Beatriz died after being involved in a traffic accident in 2017, but her case is before judges at the inter-American court of human rights and could open the way for El Salvador to decriminalise abortion, which could also set an important precedent in across the Caribbean, South and Central America, abortion is not permitted in seven countries.
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. Women have been jailed for miscarriages. And women who advocate for safe access to abortion facing hate and threats online as well as offline.
The Global Center for Human Rights, a US-based anti-abortion organisation linked to conservative evangelical groups and the Heritage Foundation opposes what it calls “ideological colonisation [of] countries rooted in Christian values”. They create websites, petitions and videos where to spread fake news like that Beatriz case was made up by the inter-American court to legalize abortion but also to spread hate against abortion activists by for example calling them “enemy of the state”, a “colleague of terrorists” and a “feminazi”.
This has serious consequences. An activist telles the Guardian: “I have received a lot of threats and hate speech on social networks, especially on X,” she says. “A post can lead to a wave of comments where I’m called a murderer; people accuse me of promoting a crime and there are requests that the attorney general investigate me.” Anti-abortion groups often gather outside her office to pray, which she sees as an act of intimidation. 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.
