Articulated Networks: The Twenty-Year Struggle to Decriminalize Abortion in El Salvador

Abstract

The year 2018 marked the twentieth anniversary of a legal reform outlawing abortion under all circumstances in El Salvador. Since then, women have been sentenced to upwards of thirty years in prison for undergoing an abortion, and even for experiencing an unprovoked obstetric emergency. In the face of this penal brutality against women, for the past fifteen years feminist and women’s organizations have intensified their activities at home and abroad, seeking not only legislative reform but also a shift away from the socio-cultural constructions permeating this practice. In an attempt to understand the battle to decriminalize abortion in El Salvador, this chapter proposes an exegesis of two turning points in the abortion debate over the past two decades: first, in the 1990s, legal reforms (to the Criminal Code and the Constitution), and, second, just a few years into the twenty-first century, the emergence of coordinated resistance to the ban on abortion. This will permit me to analyze the development of the abortion debate in different political and institutional settings in El Salvador...