SAN SALVADOR – Evelyn Hernandez has a message for El Salvador’s president: Finish the criminalization of abortion within the conservative Central American nation.
Hernandez, 21, was exonerated earlier this week in a carefully watched retrial after an earlier judgment discovered her responsible of killing her stillborn son and sentenced her to 30 years in jail.
Her case attracted worldwide consideration and got here almost three months after Nayib Bukele took workplace in June, prompting questions on whether or not he would name for a softer method to abortion in a rustic that bans any termination of a being pregnant.
In the course of the marketing campaign, Bukele mentioned he favored authorized abortion in instances the place the lifetime of the mom is in danger, a place that represented a big shift for abortion politics within the overwhelmingly Roman Catholic and evangelical nation.
Nonetheless, lawmakers have but to take up a proposal submitted to Congress in 2016 that might legalize abortion in instances of high-risk pregnancies or rape.
When requested at a press convention about what she hoped Bukele would do, Hernandez mentioned the president ought to “actually see what these instances are like for girls, how we’re discriminated in opposition to.”
“I really feel that he would take into consideration decriminalizing abortion,” she mentioned.
Hernandez mentioned she was raped by a gang member and unaware of her being pregnant till simply earlier than delivering a stillborn son in April 2016. She served three years of her three-decade sentence earlier than the retrial started in mid-July.
Smiling, Hernandez mentioned she now deliberate to review English and laptop science, and help different girls jailed due to comparable circumstances.
“I now really feel my freedom. I really feel like I’ve come again to life,” she mentioned. “Might God preserve serving to my comrades which might be additionally (in jail), in order that they will obtain justice and get out of there.”
Almost 150 Salvadoran girls have been sentenced to as much as 4 a long time in jail in abortion-related instances between 2000 and 2014, in accordance with the Citizen Group for the Decriminalization of Abortion, an area rights group.
The group mentioned it might search contemporary critiques of no less than 16 comparable instances.