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Teenage rape victim in El Salvador handed 30-year prison sentence over stillbirth to face retrial for murder
Campaigners estimate around 20 women are in prison for abortion crimes in country
A teenage rape victim in El Salvador who was convicted for murdering her child and imprisoned for nearly three years after a stillbirth will now face a retrial next week.
Evelyn Beatriz Hernandez was given a 30-year jail sentence in 2017 for aggravated murder by a female judge who ruled the teenager had induced an abortion.
El Salvador has one of the harshest abortion bans in the world – it is even illegal in cases of rape and incest, when the woman’s life is in danger or if the foetus is deformed.
Ms Hernandez, now 21 and from a poor rural community, said she was raped and did not realise she was pregnant until she went into labour in a bathroom and gave birth to a stillborn baby.
The Citizen Group for the Decriminalisation of Abortion (CDFA) said there was no proof that she tried to kill her baby and that she suffered a pregnancy-related complication.
Miscarriages and stillbirths in El Salvador are often treated as suspected abortions, which have been considered murder under Salvadoran law since 1997. Abortion is a crime under any circumstance in the Central American country.
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