Woman freed after 15 years in jail for controversial miscarriage charge
A woman who was charged with aggravated homicide after delivering a stillborn baby in 2003 and sentenced to 30 years in jail was released Tuesday in El Salvador. The case puts a spotlight on a country with one of the harshest abortion laws in the world.
Maira Verónica Figueroa Marroquín, 34, had her sentence commuted by the Ministry of Justice from 30-years to the 15 years she had already served.
“It is excessive and immoral,” a decision from the Ministry stated. “She has spent enough time in prison.”
A parallel legal process, to completely pardon Figueroa, was denied by a court in 2015. That means that courts continue to maintain Figueroa intentionally killed her baby.
As she emerged from the Ilopango Women’s Prison, located outside the capital San Salvador, Figueroa was greeted by her family. Teodora del Carmen Vásquez, who was released from the same jail on February 15 after serving 10 years of a 30-year sentence for the same crime, was also there to greet Figueroa.
“It was a moment of absolute happiness and many hugs,” said Catalina Martinez, the regional director for Latin America and the Caribbean at the Center for Reproductive Rights, which represented Figueroa. “Now there are a lot of questions she has to answer, like where to live and what comes next. But for now it was a day of celebration.”
Figueroa, who worked as a housekeeper in a rural municipality of El Salvador when she suffered what she says was a miscarriage, is one of dozens of women who have been sentenced to extensive jail time in the past two decades in El Salvador following reported complications. Though prosecutors declared they killed their babies, the women insist that their newborns were either born dead or died shortly after delivery.
El Salvador has one of the most severe abortion laws in the world. With staunch from the country’s Catholic Church and a powerful pro-life lobby, abortion became illegal in 1998 in El Salvador in all cases including rape. It’s one of only five countries in the world where abortion is not allowed even to save the life of a pregnant mother.
Human rights groups say that those laws result in an environment of discrimination and mistrust. That has garnered international condemnation in recent years, with groups like the United Nations and Amnesty International calling for an end to the unjust practice of punishing women for apparent miscarriages and other obstetric emergencies. Nearly all such cases in El Salvador involve poor women who have little to no access to healthcare or legal representation.
In 2003, a 19-year-old Figueroa experienced a late-term miscarriage in the house where she worked as a domestic employee. She was transferred to the National Hospital of Chalchuapa, where she was detained and accused of having an abortion. Later, the state’s Attorney General changed the classification of the crime to aggravated homicide, and sentenced her to 30 years in prison.
El Salvador’s Citizen’s Group for the Decriminalization of Abortion has been advocating for Figueroa’s release for the past five years. In their request for commutation filed last year, the Citizen’s Group argued that Figueroa did not have access to due process under the law, and that she never got to tell her version of the story. They also argued that she did not have an adequate defense; Figueroa was assigned four different public defenders throughout the legal process.
The Citizens Group and the Center for Reproductive Rights will continue to fight for changes to El Salvador’s abortion law, Martinez says.
More than 20 women remain in jail with the same charges.
"It's a victory in the sense that she was released, but bittersweet because they still do not recognize her innocence,” Martinez says. “Today we celebrate but tomorrow we continue the fight."