observer

Everyone that is Pro-life and Pro-Choice should read this.It may take long, but it's worth it.

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.
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Donna Ferrato for The New York Times
The Doctor: Carmen Vargas, chief of OB/GYN residents at a maternity hospital in San Salvador. "When we see physical evidence," she says, "we are required to report." More Photos >
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.


Their is more about the article on at this link.Start from page 3 http://www.nytimes.com/2006/04/09/magazine/09abortion.html?pagewanted=2&_r=1

janelle

Too bad she hasn't heard of Americans who go to other countries to adopt because there are so few babies here to adopt. If money was spent educating people about these programs then this woman and a couple from here could be have met and the adoption would have gone through.

Now I need to find a story about how in China the government will kill the baby after birth if the parents have more than one child----forced abortions or the woman has to dump her child outside of an orphanage hoping someone will find it.