NY Times Magazine, April 9, 2006 Pro-Life Nation By JACK HITT
It was a sunny midafternoon in a shiny new global-economy mall in San Salvador, the capital city of El Salvador, and a young woman I was hoping to meet appeared to be getting cold feet. She had agreed to rendezvous with a go-between not far from the Payless shoe store and then come to a nearby hotel to talk to me. She was an hour late. Alone in the hotel lobby, I was feeling nervous; I was stood up the day before by another woman in a similar situation. I had been warned that interviewing anyone who had had an abortion in El Salvador would be difficult. The problem was not simply that in this very Catholic country a shy 24-year-old unmarried woman might feel shame telling her story to an older man. There was also the criminal stigma. And this was why I had come to El Salvador: Abortion is a serious felony here for everyone involved, including the woman who has the abortion. Some young women are now serving prison sentences, a few as long as 30 years. More than a dozen countries have liberalized their abortion laws in recent years, including South Africa, Switzerland, Cambodia and Chad. In a handful of others, including Russia and the United States (or parts of it), the movement has been toward criminalizing more and different types of abortions. In South Dakota, the governor recently signed the most restrictive abortion bill since the Supreme Court ruled in 1973, in Roe v. Wade, that state laws prohibiting abortion were unconstitutional. The South Dakota law, which its backers acknowledge is designed to test Roe v. Wade in the courts, forbids abortion, including those cases in which the pregnancy is a result of rape or incest. Only if an abortion is necessary to save the life of the mother is the procedure permitted. A similar though less restrictive bill is now making its way through the Mississippi Legislature. In this new movement toward criminalization, El Salvador is in the vanguard. The array of exceptions that tend to exist even in countries where abortion is circumscribed rape, incest, fetal malformation, life of the mother don't apply in El Salvador. They were rejected in the late 1990's, in a period after the country's long civil war ended. The country's penal system was revamped and its constitution was amended. Abortion is now absolutely forbidden in every possible circumstance. No exceptions. There are other countries in the world that, like El Salvador, completely ban abortion, including Malta, Chile and Colombia. El Salvador, however, has not only a total ban on abortion but also an active law-enforcement apparatus the police, investigators, medical spies, forensic vagina inspectors and a special division of the prosecutor's office responsible for Crimes Against Minors and Women, a unit charged with capturing, trying and incarcerating an unusual kind of criminal. Like the woman I was waiting to meet. I was on my sixth cup of coffee when I spotted my contacts two abortion rights advocates who work in the region and a local nurse who had heard this young woman's story. They entered the lobby surrounding another woman like Secret Service agents. A quick glance let me know that I shouldn't make a premature appearance. Even as I retreated to some large sofas, I could hear the Spanish flying words of comfort, of being brave, of the importance that others understand what is happening in El Salvador. At last the retinue approached. I was not quite ready for what I saw. The woman, I had been told, lived in a hovel in a very poor part of the town. Somehow that had put a certain picture in my head. I don't know, call it sexism. I just didn't expect to see a tall and strikingly beautiful woman with the kind of big grin that could very well appear in one of those full-page ads you might see in an airline magazine inviting people to "Vacation in El Salvador!" We chatted briefly about the one thing I knew we had in common malls before we went up to a quiet hotel room, where she and I could talk. One intermediary acted as our interpreter. I agreed to call her by her initials, D.C.; she is afraid to be identified by name, though she did agree to be photographed. (While it was impossible to confirm every detail of her story, I did later see legal records that corroborated her description of events.) D.C. sat down, and now that we were ready to talk about her experience, she started to cry. She wiped her eyes several times with a paper napkin. She spent a few minutes folding and twisting it. D.C. crossed her ankles and stared down at the shrinking napkin, now tightly compacted into a large pill. Then she began to tell me her story. I worked in a clothing factory two years ago. I have a son, 7 years old. Well, when I found out I was pregnant, I didn't know what to do. I told my friend. She told me if I was going to have it, I needed to think about that. I had a child already. I told the father. He said he didn't want another child. He didn't want to deal with problems like this. My mother told me she would kick me out if I ever got pregnant again. I started talking to my friend. Every day was so hard. I cried, and I didn't do anything. I didn't want to see anybody, and I didn't sleep. My friend told me to go to a man, and he gave me some pills. I was two months pregnant. He said that I could put them in my vagina. I did, and after that I just bled a couple of times. Two months more went by. I was still pregnant. I cried and didn't know what to do. When I was about four months along, my friend told me one of her friends lived near a house where there was a woman who did abortions. I felt so worried. I didn't know what to do, whether I should go talk to the woman. But then one day, I went. With the signing of the Chapultepec Agreements in Mexico in 1992, El Salvador's civil war came to an end. As the nation turned away from its violent years, there were calls from both sides of the political divide that it was time to re-examine certain social issues. One of them was abortion. The country's abortion law, like the law in most Latin American countries at the time, was already a near-ban with only a few exceptions, specifically in cases of rape, serious fetal malformation and grave risk to the mother's life. For decades, the law was rarely discussed, and enforced quietly and somewhat subjectively. Once the issue was raised in the political arena, though, Salvadorans discovered that a brand-new kind of discourse on abortion had emerged in Latin America. In El Salvador, a mostly Catholic country, abortion first surfaced as a potent political issue in 1993, when conservative members of the Assembly proposed that Dec. 28, the Catholic Feast of the Holy Innocents, be declared a national day to remember the unborn. In 1995, the FMLN the former guerrilla force that had transformed itself into the country's main left-wing party supported a very different proposal in the National Assembly. The proposal addressed a variety of women's issues, including domestic violence and rape. It also contained a provision to extend the abortion exceptions to include cases in which the mother's mental health was threatened, even if her life was not. This liberalizing proposal was rejected, but it provoked a debate, which in turn had the effect of raising the political heat around the subject of abortion. Also in 1995, Pope John Paul II appointed a new archbishop for San Salvador, Fernando Sáenz Lacalle. Archbishops in El Salvador inherit a potent history. During the civil war, many members of the clergy in El Salvador were proponents of liberation theology, a liberal some would say radical evangelical doctrine of social justice. The movement was despised by the country's right-wing leaders. In 1980, in a hospital chapel, Archbishop Óscar Arnulfo Romero, a proponent of liberation theology, was shot and killed by a right-wing death squad while celebrating Mass. His replacement, Arturo Rivera Damas, was also a supporter of liberation theology. The pope's appointment of Lacalle 11 years ago brought to the Archdiocese of San Salvador a different kind of religious leader. Lacalle, an outspoken member of the conservative Catholic group Opus Dei, redirected the country's church politics. Lacalle's predecessors were just as firmly opposed to abortion as he was. What he brought to the country's anti-abortion movement was a new determination to turn that opposition into state legislation and a belief that the church should play a public role in the process. In 1997, conservative legislators in the Assembly introduced a bill that would ban abortion in all circumstances. The archbishop campaigned actively for its passage. "The ban was part of a backlash," I was told by Luisa Cabal, the legal consultant for Latin America at the Center for Reproductive Rights, an abortion rights organization based in New York. The proposed bill, Cabal said, was a result of "the church's role in pushing for a conservative agenda." With the archbishop's vocal support of the ban and conservative groups fully energized, opposition soon became difficult. Any argument in favor of therapeutic abortion was met with a religious counterargument. Julia Regina de Cardenal runs the Yes to Life Foundation in San Salvador, which provides prenatal care and job training to poor pregnant women. She was a key advocate for the passage of the ban. She argued that the existing law's exception for the life of the mother was outdated. As she explained to me, "There does not exist any case in which the life of the mother would be in danger, because technology has advanced so far." De Cardenal was particularly vehement in responding in print to her opponents. As she wrote in one Salvadoran newspaper column in 1997, "The Devil, tireless Prince of Lies, has tried and will continue to try to change our laws in order to kill our babies." Positions on the strengthened ban essentially split along party lines, at least at first. "The majority of our leadership came out in opposition," Lorena Peña, an FMLN representative in the Assembly, told me. But the FMLN held only a minority of the seats in the 84-member Assembly, and they were unable to stop the bill. The proposal to ban all abortions passed the Assembly in 1997 and became the law of the country in April 1998. "But that was not enough," de Cardenal later wrote in an article recounting the victory. In 1997, her foundation also proposed a constitutional amendment that would recognize the government's duty to protect life from the time of conception. A proposed constitutional amendment in El Salvador has to pass two important votes. It must be accepted by a majority in one session of the Assembly and then, after a new election, ratified by a two-thirds vote in the next Assembly. During the first vote, in 1997, FMLN legislators stood against the amendment, but they were outvoted, and the amendment passed the first round. In January 1999, as the issue headed toward the second vote in the Assembly, Pope John Paul II visited Latin America. "The church must proclaim the Gospel of life and speak out with prophetic force against the culture of death," he declared in Mexico City."May the continent of hope also be the continent of life!" De Cardenal says that the pope's visit re-energized supporters of the constitutional ban. As the vote neared, her group rolled out a series of radio ads in favor of the amendment and presented legislators with a petition of more than 500,000 signatures. At one demonstration, members of the group sprinkled the National Assembly with holy water. To punctuate her campaign, de Cardenal arranged to have two pregnant women come to the Assembly and have ultrasounds publicly performed on their fetuses. The leadership of the FMLN, afraid that the party would be trounced in the coming elections if they were on the record as opposing the amendment, freed its deputies from their obligation to follow the party's position and urged them to vote with their consciences. When the final vote was taken, the amendment passed overwhelmingly. The legislative battle and its outcome did not escape the attention of leaders of anti-abortion groups in the United States. Rev. Thomas J. Euteneuer, the head of Human Life International, based in Virginia, is intimately familiar with the campaign in El Salvador and says that there are lessons for Americans to learn from it. For one thing, as Euteneuer sees it, the Salvadoran experience shows that all moves to expand abortion rights are pushed through by "elite" institutions of government (the U.S. Supreme Court, for example); by contrast, Euteneuer contends, when the laws are tightened, a grass-roots campaign is inevitably responsible. "El Salvador is an inspiration," he told me recently, an important victory in what he called "the counterrevolution of conscience." Today, Article 1 of El Salvador's constitution declares that the prime directive of government is to protect life from the "very moment of conception." The penal code detailing the Crimes Against the Life of Human Beings in the First Stages of Development provides stiff penalties: the abortion provider, whether a medical doctor or a back-alley practitioner, faces 6 to 12 years in prison. The woman herself can get 2 to 8 years. Anyone who helps her can get 2 to 5 years. Additionally, judges have ruled that if the fetus was viable, a charge of aggravated homicide can be brought, and the penalty for the woman can be 30 to 50 years in prison. (This article is too long to post in its entirety, but can be read online at: http://www.nytimes.com/2006/04/09/magazine/09abortion.html ________________________________ * Previous message: [Marxism] Why I unsubbed and why I resubbed * Messages sorted by: [ date ] [ thread ] [ subject ] [ author ] ________________________________ More information about the Marxism mailing list <http://lists.econ.utah.edu/mailman/listinfo/marxism> _______________________________________________ Marxism-Thaxis mailing list [email protected] To change your options or unsubscribe go to: http://lists.econ.utah.edu/mailman/listinfo/marxism-thaxis
