Hey, it's standard now in the GOP. No exceptions. And if you ask them about whether doctors should spare the life of the woman if it came to that, they'd say that never happens.
When Guadalupe Vasquez became pregnant at 17 after being raped by a neighbor of the house where she worked as a maid, she decided she wanted the baby. She even picked out a name: Gabriel.
Then, on a day in late 2007, pain shot through her back and abdomen. Vasquez says she started bleeding, but her employer wouldn't let her leave the house to get medical care. Sick in her room and alone, she went into labor.
She heard the baby cry briefly, and then he was dead.
Only then did the employer send her to the hospital, saying she did not want to "deal with two dead in my house," Vasquez recalls. She passed out, and when she came to, she was handcuffed to the bed at a state hospital.
The rapist was free, but now it would be Vasquez who would go to prison — for seven years and three months.
asquez is one of several women in El Salvador who have been sentenced to as long as 50 years behind bars — not for having an abortion, which is illegal in the country, but as a result of miscarriages or stillborn births. In these cases, prosecutors have accused the women of causing the death of their fetus or infant.
El Salvador, along with neighboring Nicaragua and three other countries, has the strictest abortion laws in the hemisphere. Virtually no exception is allowed for the termination of pregnancy, not for rape, incest, malformed fetus or danger to the woman's life.
Yet the law is being taken to another extreme: imprisoning women who say the loss of their fetus or child was not their doing.
Four days after Vasquez awoke in handcuffs, she was whisked to a courtroom. After two brief hearings, she says, she received a 30-year prison sentence for homicide.
"I didn't understand what was happening," said the recently freed Vasquez, who is from a rural village and never made it past third grade. A court-appointed attorney "barely spoke to me. He didn't defend me in anything."
Salvadoran activists who have taken up the cause of Vasquez and other women have identified 17 similar cases and believe at least 15 more such prisoners languish in overcrowded Salvadoran prisons, alongside gangsters and murderers.
The Salvadoran Citizens' Coalition for the Decriminalization of Abortion offers even bleaker statistics: 129 women prosecuted between 2000 and 2011 for "abortion" crimes, 23 convicted for having received an illegal abortion and 26 convicted of homicide.
Keep in mind that when it comes to making compromises for electoral expediency women's rights are always the first chip that's given up regardless of partisan affinity:
The irony for some is that two countries with such strict laws, El Salvador and Nicaragua, are run by leftist governments.
In the case of Nicaragua, the explanation is rooted in political expediency. Sandinista leader Daniel Ortega, struggling to regain the presidency after a series of electoral defeats, needed Nicaragua's powerful Roman Catholic Church on his side. He struck a deal with erstwhile enemy Cardinal Miguel Obando y Bravo, the man who had vehemently opposed him when Ortega was a fiery revolutionary comandante in the 1970s and '80s.
With the church's help, Ortega won the presidency in late 2006, was inaugurated in January 2007, and a year later, a congress controlled by Ortega strengthened Nicaragua's 100-year-old abortion law to make the procedure illegal in all cases.
In El Salvador, the abortion ban dates to the two-decade reign of the conservative Arena party. In 1998, when the country had only recently emerged from a devastating civil war, conservative sectors of the Catholic Church, including the ultra-right-wing Opus Dei, campaigned successfully for a change in the constitution that declared life began with conception.
An absolute prohibition of abortion has stayed in place even though the leftist Farabundo Marti National Liberation Front won the presidency in 2009 and has governed since. Only in the last months has President Salvador Sanchez Ceren said the matter "needed discussion."
That's happened many times here too. No we're not jailing women for miscarriages yet. But the logic behind all this "personhood" folderol inexorably leads there.