A 27-year-old woman has been sentenced to eight years in prison after suffering a miscarriage in a hospital in San Miguel de Tucumán.
The woman, known as Belén to protect her identity, was convicted of ‘intentional homicide’ on 19th April after already spending more than two years in prison. Judges ruled she had deliberately provoked an abortion, which is illegal in Argentina except in certain circumstances.
‘Legal abortion now!’ is scrawled in front of the Casa Rosada in Buenos Aires (photo: Thiago Skárnio, via flickr)
Belén went to hospital with stomach pains in March 2014. She was transferred to the gynecology ward, where a doctor discovered she was having a miscarriage due to heavy bleeding.
Belén said she did not know that she was pregnant, a claim she repeated in later testimonies, but says she was interrogated by hospital staff, who accused her of deliberately inducing an abortion and reported the case to the police. Belén was arrested and taken to prison after being released from hospital a few days later.
Soledad Deza, the lawyer now representing Belén since the verdict was released, says she was convicted without any scientific proof that she had induced an abortion.
Deza says the police and doctors identified a foetus found in one of the hospital bathrooms as belonging to Belén without conducting any DNA tests. In her court defence, Belén described how: “a nurse brought me the foetus in a box and insulted me for what I had done. I told him it wasn’t mine and he said ‘look, this is your son’.”
“They connected her to a 32-week foetus without any proof of a link to Belén,” Deza told regional paper La Gaceta Tucumán. “Moreover, there are contradictions between the gestational age of this foetus with that of the abortion that doctors registered on Belén’s hospital file.” According to the hospital records, says Deza, Belén’s miscarriage had occurred at 20-22 weeks of her pregnancy.
Deza also claims Belén was subjected to degrading physical tests by police and had her rights to medical privacy violated.
“We’re talking about a woman with limited material and symbolic resources, who has been in prison for two years for the sole reason that she is a woman and because of a special acrimony towards her from the medical personnel who mistreated her instead of helping her and due to an aggressive penal system that makes examples of women,” said Deza.
The National Campaign for the Right to Legal, Safe and Free abortion called for Belén’s immediate release, saying she had been unfairly condemned by “a criminal alliance” between the Avellaneda Hospital staff, the police officials involved, and members of the local courts.
The NGO demanded the provincial Supreme Court annul the verdict as the case against Belén was also founded on a violation of patient-doctor confidentiality. It also called on National Congress to legalise abortion across all of Argentina.
Tucumán is among several Argentine provinces that has not adapted local laws to comply with the 2012 Supreme Court ruling on non-punishable abortion.
The post Tucumán: Woman Sentenced to Eight Years in Prison for Miscarriage appeared first on The Argentina Independent.
