Jailed for Abortion? Let’s free them!

“Women who are beaten by their men are advised to resign, laugh and pray,” is how Verónica Cruz, president of the Centro Las Libres, an association interested in defending civil and reproductive rights for the women of the Mexican state of Guanajuato, characterizes the posture of  Luz María Ramírez Villalpando, director of the Institute of the Guanjajuato Woman. Ramírez Villalpando also declared days ago that “women with tattoos are the first to blame for the loss of values in our society.”  She is the sister-in-law of the secretary of Guanajuato state Gerardo Mosqueda. He is also second in charge in the local chapter of El Yunque, [a supposed ultra-Catholic secret society with apparently strong ties with the local government.] 

In 2001, when Vicente Fox became president, the heir to his state government seat [Fox was governor of his native state of Guanajuato from 1995-99,] Carlos Romero Hicks, was backed by the PAN (National Action Party) and the ONY (National Organization of the El Yunque.) During his six-year tenure, Romero Hicks modified laws and public policies related to sexual education and reproductive rights in order to “harmonize” them with the religious ideas of the new administration, according to Verónica Cruz.

Sexual education for pre-pubescent children and adolescents was practically suppressed in private and public schools. Drawings of male and female reproductive rights were eliminated from science books, as the Taliban of El Bajío (in Guanajuato state,) believe that they “incite lust.” They launched a permanent campaign against condoms and birth control based in another dogma: that the only way to prevent sexually-transmitted diseases and unwanted pregnancies is abstinence.   

When, in response to protests by several groups around the country, the federal “government” prohibited El Yunque’s science book and demanded that they use the one edited by the department of education, the Guanajuato Taliban burned it in a public plaza in Leon, according to Cruz. And Carlos García, a La Jornada correspondent, states that Mrs. Ramírez Villalpando (who is not a doctor but an interior designer) said  that  “women secrete a spermicidal fluid as they are being raped, which protects them from getting pregnant.” Undoubtedly, this is why Guanajuato’s walls have the following statement painted on them, framed by the state government’s seals and emblems: “Whether for love or for violence, abortion is a crime.”  

Murderous uteri

In the summer of 2004, an investigator from the Institute for Social Studies of The Hague documented cases of women in Chiapas who had spontaneous abortions due to the conditions of extreme poverty in which they live. I obtained data about perfectly healthy women in urban areas whose pregnancies were involuntarily interrupted between the fifth and sixth month because they had “infantile uterus,” that is, their wombs were incapable to contain a developing fetus.

Since 2001, spontaneous abortions due to malnutrition or any other physical limitation as well as voluntary interruptions of pregnancy, are punished with up to 35 years in jail in Guanajuato.  For the El Bajío Taliban, these are “homicides of kinship by reason of aggravation of a product in gestation,” according to the state’s penal code. Or, as simplified by Governor Juan Manuel Oliva Ramírez in an interview published yesterday by La Jornada, they are “infanticide.”

Just today, because of this vile accusation, five young peasant women woke up in jail at the Social Rehabilitation Center in Puentecillas, in the outskirts of Guanajuato’s capital, and another one in Valle de Santiago, near Michoacan. They are all sentenced to more than 25 years of  imprisonment. The oldest one in the group (who is just 26 and has already served 9 of her 26-year sentence,) has never received medical attention, reproductive health education or assistance to prevent or interrupt her pregnancies. One of them became pregnant the fourth time she was raped, and was arrested after she had an abortion, while she received no protection against the men who abused her for years.

Aside from being victims of such an atrocious and unacceptable injustice, all these women received the same surprise when they arrived to public hospitals, dripping blood and psychologically devastated:  before they were treated in the emergency room, the hospital personnel called agents of the appropriate public agency in order to catch them “in the act.”  

The six of them –plus Alma Yareli Salazar Saldaña, who was freed– went from the hospital straight to jail. After being sentenced, some of them appealed to the Superior Court of Justice, but they lost the case due to the lack of good lawyers. Now, in order to bring it to the Supreme Court (Mexico’s moral dump,) each of them needs to gather at least 500 thousand Mexican pesos [almost $40,000 USD] to get a lawyer to represent them. An impossible dream, since their families live in extreme poverty and rarely have the means to gather the 400 pesos ($32 USD) to travel from their villages to the Puentecillas Rehabilitation Center to visit.

United Nations v. El Yunque

Speaking of distances, a few days ago –in the eve of the Mexican visit of the United Nations Deputy High Commissioner for Human Rights, South Korean Kuyng-wha Kang–, Guanajuato’s Public Safety Agency made the Puentecillas interns sign a document in which they ask not to be interviewed by the press. Why did they accept to sign, as if they were celebrities like Angelina Jolie, Scarlett Johansson, Rachel Weisz or Natalie Portman, fed-up with the paparazzi? Because they were threatened to be transferred to Valle de Santiago. To their families, who live near the towns of Dolores Hidalgo and San Miguel de Allende, Valle de Santiago is as far away as New York is from Iztapalapa to us.

Now that we know about their existence and their torment (they are all under 30 and have their lives ahead of them,) we will not tolerate that they rot in jail. First, we need to let them know, by every possible means, they are not alone, that they must not “resign, laugh and pray,” but that they must continue fighting for their rights, certain that they will be free sooner than they think.

The quarterly paperback Desfiladero, invites its readers –wherever they may be– to think, imagine, organize, give shape and content, and activate a national and international solidarity campaign for the liberation of María Araceli Camargo Juárez, Yolanda Martínez Montoya, Ana Rosa Padrón Alarcón, Susana Dueñas, Ofelia Frías and Liliana Moreno. The campaign must undoubtedly have the Centro Las Libres as a focus, whose brave members live and fight in Guanajuato and need to become surrounded and protected by the arms of all of us.  

At this moment, there are 166 women in Guanajuato who were also turned in by their “doctors” to the police. Forty-three of them are at the mercy of the court to be submitted to a penal process. It is not only a matter of the six peasant women who are imprisoned or about the ones who are sitting in the waiting room of terror, but about all women in Mexico and throughout the world. Shall we set up this campaign? Critics, suggestions and involvement of any kind are welcome. In jail for abortion? No way!

jamastu@gmail.com