One morning, Melina felt like going to the bathroom.
He got up and walked to the latrine of his house in the ejido of Nayarit, a small town of about 1,100 inhabitants in Baja California, Mexico, very close to the border with the United States.
There, he felt himself expel a blood clot.
But since the bleeding wouldn't stop, she decided to go to the hospital.
The next day, his family discovered a lifeless body in the latrine and notified the police.
Melina, 36, had a miscarriage: she did not know she was pregnant as she was still menstruating.
Now she has been deprived of her liberty in the Ensenada prison for 6 years, serving an 18-year sentence for homicide based on kinship.
That is to say: they
accuse her of killing her son.
Like her, there are still in the country
at least
200 women in prison for spontaneous abortions, premature births or obstetric emergencies, according to data from the organization Las Libres.
Women who have been sentenced not for having an abortion but for more serious crimes, such as homicide based on kinship, a penalty that carries up to 40 years in prison.
But
in Mexico, no woman should be left in jail for having an abortion after the Supreme Court of Justice of the Nation issued three historic rulings
in the fight for the reproductive rights of women and pregnant people.
On September 7, he declared the criminalization of abortion unconstitutional: he recognized that no woman can be prosecuted for interrupting her pregnancy and he unanimously declared himself in favor of women deciding about their own body and life.
Feminist groups in the Plaza de la Nueva Tlaxcala after the decriminalization of abortion in Coahuila, on September 7, 2021, Saltillo, Mexico.Antonio Ojeda / Agencia Press South / Getty Images
Two days later it declared unconstitutional to protect life from conception, that is,
states cannot equate the embryo or fetus with a person.
And shortly afterwards it ruled that although health personnel have the right to exercise conscientious objection, this cannot be a way to circumvent the right to interrupt pregnancy.
[The FDA finally approves the shipment of abortion pills by mail]
"With these three decisions, the court is repairing us enormously," celebrated attorney Micheel Salas, director of the Action Group for Human Rights and Social Justice.
Since then, the green tide has not stopped advancing:
there are already six states that have decriminalized abortion
during the first 12 weeks of gestation.
In October
Baja California
was added
and in December,
Colima,
Mexico City, Oaxaca, Hidalgo and Veracruz.
"Not a dog would do that"
The authorities threatened Melina with sentencing her to more than 30 years in prison and, to avoid this, she accepted an abbreviated trial in exchange for incriminating herself.
The woman has been a constant target of attacks by the authorities.
"They told him at all times that not a dog would do that,"
said José Luis Gutiérrez, director of the organization that handles his case, Legal Assistance for Human Rights (Asilegal).
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She was also forced to pay more than 700,000 pesos to the father of the embryo or fetus to repair the damage but, after reaching an agreement with him, she resigned.
Melina is waiting to serve half her sentence so she can ask for a pre-release benefit, and continue her process in freedom and go back to hugging her two children, who were only teenagers when she stopped seeing them.
[This is the last abortion doctor in Wyoming. And he could leave the state because of the hostility he receives]
Meanwhile, she spends 23 hours a day in a cell with seven other women and
only has an hour to go out into the courtyard and breathe a little freedom.
The punishment was not only for her, her mother has to travel a whole day to see her and she spends the little money she has.
The lawyer Gutiérrez explains that the other strategy that he contemplated for his release was to resort to the Amnesty Law approved by the Government in 2020. A mechanism designed to repair the injustices to which various vulnerable groups have been subjected and that seeks to free some 6,000 people in order to decongest the prisons.
The law includes crimes such as petty theft, drug possession and contemplates women sentenced for abortion and also for murder on the grounds of kinship.
But, after more than a year of applying the law, the Mexican government has only released 44 people of the 1,798 applications submitted, according to the Undersecretary of Human Rights, Alejandro Encinas, on Thursday.
[No, it is false that there is an increased risk of miscarriage from the COVID-19 vaccine]
"What did you drink?"
Ana * was 17 years old when she had a miscarriage in a high school in Umán, a town of about 60,000 inhabitants located in southeastern Mexico, about 11 miles from Mérida, Yucatán.
Due to what happened that morning, he faces, two years later, a criminal process for homicide based on kinship.
Women demonstrate for the right to abortion in the Zócalo of Mexico City, on September 28, 2021.Araceli López / Vía Milenio
Ana had started to feel bad on the way to school.
He thought that the oranges he had brought for Janal Pixán, or Day of the Dead, had disliked him.
The pain was getting stronger and when he reached the center, he ran to the bathroom, which was so small that he could barely fit with the backpack.
There he noticed that he was bleeding, heard a knock and saw a fetus fall into the toilet.
He grabbed it, wanted to ask for help but he no longer reacted: he fainted at that very moment and, when he fell, he broke a door.
That morning,
Ana had a miscarriage in her third trimester of pregnancy.
The school staff pulled her out of the bathroom in a wheelchair and called an ambulance.
“The teachers didn't tell me anything when it happened,
the only one who asked me 'what did you take' was a paramedic
... There was a doctor who, when I had a curettage [a surgical intervention to remove the endometrium, the mucosa that covers the uterus] He said why didn't I realize it, why did I do it, why did I provoke it, "Ana told Noticias Telemundo.
[California prepares to become a safe abortion destination amid increasing restrictions in other states]
Later, the state prosecutor's office went to the hospital to check her backpack for pills and other items that showed that she wanted to hide her pregnancy, tried to check her cell phone and question her.
But the doctor refused and recalled that Ana was a minor and that she could not speak unless her guardian was present.
It was a week and a half before Ana could leave the hospital.
She had a vaginal tear and hemorrhage so strong that it caused anemia from which she has not recovered two years later.
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One by one, the prosecution called his relatives to testify.
"We could say that they harassed her because they summoned the father, the grandmother, even the aunt, the much smaller brother [...] to provide information against her," said her lawyer Amelia Ojeda Sosa, from Las Libres .
[Uma Thurman recounts the abortion she experienced as a teenager in solidarity with the women of Texas]
The process was stalled for a few months due to the COVID-19 pandemic until at the end of 2020, Ana was formally accused of homicide based on kinship:
the prosecution concluded that she caused the death of the fetus that she involuntarily expelled,
"which she suffocated him ”.
The authorities offered him an abbreviated trial in exchange for accepting that he had committed a crime, but Ana did not accept, Ojeda said.
The maximum penalty he faces is five years in the specialized center for adolescents but, according to Ojeda, to the extent that the case was "full of violations of his procedural rights" or that there is no conclusive evidence of that there was a crime, it is unlikely that she will be convicted.
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An unreliable test
In both Melina's and Ana's cases, one of the few pieces of evidence that was presented against her was a lung docimasia issued by the forensic doctor, a highly controversial way of determining whether the fetus was born alive or dead.
According to Gregory J. Davis, a medical examiner at the University of Kentucky, this method, known as the "float test,
" "was discredited more than a century ago as not being a reliable indicator."
["I am innocent": Sara Rogel, sentenced to 30 years in prison in El Salvador after suffering an obstetric emergency, is released]
It is not a reliable test and we have probably known it for more than 100 years. "
Gregory J. Davis Medical Examiner
The expert explained that the test consists of the forensic doctor “taking a piece of the lung or the whole lung and making it float in the water and taking a piece of the liver or the whole liver.
And the theory of the test is that if the liver sinks and the lungs float, then the baby breathed. "
Air can enter the lungs in other ways, according to Davis: as the fetus leaves the mother, by squeezing the chest, or if there is a decomposition within the lung and gas is formed.
"It is not a reliable test and we have probably known it for more than 100 years," he said.
Therefore, the expert believes that it is a
"pseudo-test"
and that "it is irresponsible on the part of doctors to continue using it."
“In the old days in America, if they thought you were a witch, they threw you in the lake and if you sank and drowned, you were innocent.
And if you floated, you were a witch and they burned you at the stake.
This is as scientific as pulmonary docimasia, ”he
pointed out.
["We can't stay with that": women march in Mexico for the total decriminalization of abortion]
In the United States there are also doctors who practice this technique, according to Davis, a country where
the right to abortion is in danger.
The Supreme Court decided to keep in force a law that prohibits it from the sixth week (when most women do not even know they are pregnant).
And he leaned in favor of backing a Mississippi law that bans it after the 15th week of gestation.
This decision could serve to overturn the landmark 1973 ruling in
Roe v.
Wade
, who legalized abortion in the country.
[The Baby Who Changed US History Reveals Her Identity]
In El Salvador, Davis presented a report in 2014 to the General Assembly in which he discredited this evidence as part of the appeal to pardon four of the 17 women imprisoned for having suffered obstetric emergencies in the country, in a case known as
Las 17
.
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In El Salvador, which has some of the world's most restrictive abortion laws and sentences can reach 50 years in prison, today there are more than a dozen women behind bars for out-of-hospital births.
After the campaign 'Nos missing las 17' (
Free The 17
)
emerged
, which was joined by several celebrities, demanding that the Salvadoran president, Nayib Bukele, release women accused of abortion, the Government released this week to three women.
Likewise, the Inter-American Court of Human Rights strongly condemned the Salvadoran State for the arbitrary criminalization of Manuela, a woman who suffered an obstetric emergency and was sentenced to 30 years in prison.
Manuela died in 2010 of lymphatic cancer handcuffed to a bed.
Women criminalized for being poor
Unlike El Salvador, where abortion is illegal even in the case of rape, in Mexico, this is the only cause in which all states allow it.
In the 26 states where it is still illegal before 12 weeks, the penalties range from 15 days to six years in jail.
They did not decide to abort, they did not make the decision "
Verónica Cruz director of Las Libres
But in both countries, there is a pattern of women being criminalized for aborting.
“The vast majority are young women, women with limited resources, with little academic education, without knowledge of family planning issues [...].
The vast majority of them did not know they were pregnant, they had had irregular menstruation periods, ”
explained González, from Asilegal.
"In addition, many of them live miles from a medical center that can give them specialized care," he added.
[The cases of Manuela and Sara in El Salvador are an example of how the total ban on abortion threatens the lives of the poorest]
"They did not decide to have an abortion, they did not make the decision, (her spontaneous abortion) is a product of their living conditions," for her part, Verónica Cruz, director of Las Libres, condemned.
"Nothing is remedied anymore," says the Atizapán femicide from jail where he awaits sentencing
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Whats Next?
In Mexico, women who are deprived of their liberty due to spontaneous abortions have been accused not for this reason, but for more serious crimes such as infanticide, homicide to a degree of kinship, filicide and omission of care, according to data obtained by Las Libres from requests for access to information between 2000 and 2017.
But after one of the rulings of the Mexican Supreme Court,
women who abort for murder cannot be punished.
“With the vote on the Sinaloa case, the court said that it is unconstitutional for local legislation to establish that life begins from conception.
It is not up to the local authorities to define when life begins
,
”
explained lawyer Salas.
[The alleged serial murderer arrested in Mexico is prosecuted for femicide: he had the names of 29 women noted]
In the opinion of the director of Las Libres, health services should stop denouncing women who have abortions, legislators would have to eliminate the crime of abortion from the 33 criminal codes and not open more investigation folders.
In fact, the National Commission to Prevent and Eradicate Violence Against Women (Conavim) asked to review the folders opened for abortion.
However,
so far the government has not released how many of these have been closed.
"At the moment there is no such precise information, because these are processes that are outside the scope of federal crimes," said Commissioner Maria Fabiola Alanís Sámano and pointed out that she expects fewer investigation folders will be opened as a result of of the court ruling.
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[Tlaxcala's 'deception factory' fuels prostitution on both sides of the border. These girls saved their people on stage]
Between January and September of this year, 547 investigation folders were opened for the crime of abortion, according to statistics from the Executive Secretariat of the National Public Security System.
Three states account for 53% of the cases: the State of Mexico, with 124 files;
Nuevo León, with 95;
and Mexico City, with 69.
Changes have not translated into actual access
Two years after what happened, Ana realizes how much has changed.
“I am not the same 17-year-old girl that I am right now that I am 19. It changed my way of thinking,” she said.
Although the young woman still has to invest a lot of time in the judicial process, which, she said, "is very overwhelming," she finished high school, and is now studying a degree in education and works in a store.
When she finishes her degree, she wants to study veterinary medicine.
[For $ 2,000, a goat or a case of beer: this is how they sell to indigenous women in some towns in Mexico]
She knows that two years ago she was not ready to be a mother and that she is not ready now.
"To date I am not ready to have a baby," she said.
In short, the
Mexican Justice set a historical precedent, not only in the region "but worldwide"
in the recognition of the rights of women and pregnant people, in the words of the executive director of the Women's Equality Center, Paula Avila-Guillén .
But for the experts interviewed for this report, it
is necessary that these legislative changes translate into real access to public health services
.
And it is necessary for health institutions to know the document "that dictates how abortion care should be, not only in technical terms, but also in terms of quality, seeking to ensure that they are free of stigma," said Sofía Garguño Huerta, coordinator of the Fund for Abortion for Social Justice María.
And when this happens, women and people with the capacity to develop their human dignity and the possibility of determining who they want to be will be recognized, as dictated by Mexican Justice.
* We use a fictitious name to protect the identity of the victim.