Breathe
By Luciana Wainer
The governments assure that there are no women in prison for abortion. The authorities insist that it is an issue that has been overcome. Society -we men and women- tend to look the other way and lower our voices when talking about what is historically part of women's lives: abortions; spontaneous or self-generated, in private clinics, hospitals or homes, legal or clandestine. Emotional experiences are as varied as the number of women we are, but prohibition, criminalization and social stigma always bring the same consequences: risk, fear and injustice. Sometimes, years of imprisonment.
What these same authorities and governments have not told us is that women can be imprisoned, at this very moment and in 2024, for crimes other than abortion, but which are based on the same fact: the termination of a pregnancy. In February of this year I published the book Fortuito. El otro lado de la criminalización del aborto (Grijalbo, 2024), which recounts cases of women accused of homicide by reason of kinship or intentional homicide after having had an obstetric emergency, a fortuitous birth. The stories are as painful as they are improbable: a woman from the mountains of Guerrero who had a pregnancy resulting from a rape by a municipal policeman and, after having an obstetric emergency, was sentenced to 18 years in prison (and her assailant, of course, on the run). Another was brutally beaten by her partner while pregnant and almost lost her life. Hospitalized, with serious injuries, and after a fortuitous delivery during the beating, she was also charged with homicide by reason of kinship. The result was similar: she was sentenced to 45 years in prison and her assailant remained at large until the statute of limitations expired.
"John had had no contact with the judicial system and yet he knew perfectly well how it works: it is an age-old inheritance, a blind and instinctive trust in patriarchy. And he was right. Nothing would happen to him. And when I write he, I'm really talking about them. Plural and masculine: nothing ever happens to them. Their names never come up in abortion-related investigations. Or, what is worse, their abortions, their pregnancy terminations, materialize as a form of absence. That's enough.
Fortuito describes a broken justice system, the effective operation of social machismo, the differentiated impact of gender, but also of class. Because the most brutal, the most unjust, the most disproportionate and surreal sentences are always against the poorest women. But what this book really wants to raise is the process through which these women become invisible within the system and their cases become untraceable, since they hide an obstetric emergency by calling it homicide. How do we find them?
At this moment, in Yucatan, a teenager was forced to accept an abbreviated trial under pressure from the authorities. That is to say, to plead guilty to homicide by reason of kinship in order to obtain a lesser sentence and avoid the oral trial that could give her a harsher sentence. Her "crime" was to have an obstetric emergency, something beyond her control, a health complication that should be taken care of by the State. She did not know she was pregnant, but the judge assured that this was not possible since "she was studying high school". The irregularities in the case are multiple, the systemic violence infinite. Now, the organization Las Libres, which for 24 years has been defending women unjustly accused or taking cases of gender violence, is accompanying this teenager. Although it will not be easy to reverse the agreement, which was reached under pressure after so many irregularities, it will not be easy.
Let us press for a review of this case; let us shout so that it is known that this is happening in our country; let us demand that the prisons, sentences and investigation files be reviewed to find them all. There may be ten; there may be thousands.
The opinions expressed are the responsibility of the authors and are absolutely independent of the position and editorial line of the company. Opinion 51.
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