Required Reading: "Pro-Life Nation"

Ethan Heitner

April 11, 2006

Many of you may have heard about this, but if there anyone who hasn't, I can't think of a single more important piece to read right now relating to current restrictions on abortion in this country than Jack Hitt's piece for the New York Times magazine, Pro-Life Nation .

In El Salvador, abortion is a crime. Aborting a fetus deemed "viable" is aggravated homicide. Doctors are legally obligated to report women who have had abortions to the police. Most of those reported list their occupations as homemakers, maids and students. The rich, presumably, are having their abortions somewhere safe.

Here are only a few of the chilling details:

Prosecutors investigating a suspected abortion can force an examination of a woman's uterus and vagina:

As they do in any investigation, the police collect evidence by interviewing everyone who knows the accused and by seizing her medical records. But they must also visit the scene of the crime, which, following the logic of the law, often means the woman's vagina.

"Yes, we sometimes call doctors from the Forensic Institute to do a pelvic exam," Tópez said, referring to the nation's main forensic lab, "and we ask them to document lacerations or any evidence such as cuts or a perforated uterus." In other words, if the suspicions of the patient's doctor are not conclusive enough, then in that initial 72-hour period, a forensic doctor can legally conduct a separate search of the crime scene.

Doctors are not allowed to operate on ectopic pregnancies, and have to wait for the fallopian tubes to rupture, potentially causing massive internal bleeding:

"If it's dead, we can operate," she said. "Before that, we can't." If there is a persistent fetal heartbeat, then they have to wait for the fallopian tube to rupture.

Prosecutors can put women away for up to 50 years:

 In prosecutors' offices in El Salvador, as in prosecutors' offices anywhere, longer sentences are considered better sentences. "The more years one can send someone away for," I was told by Margarita Sanabria, a magistrate who has handled several abortion cases, "the better it is for the prosecutors." She cited this motivation to account for what she has observed recently: more later-term abortions being reclassified as "aggravated homicide." If an aborted fetus is found to have been viable, the higher charge can be filed. The penalty for abortion can be as low as two years in prison. Aggravated homicide has a minimum sentence of 30 years and a maximum of 50 years.

And if there's any doubt that this is what anti-choice activists in America want, let this article dispell them:

Rev. Thomas J. Euteneuer, the head of Human Life International, based in Virginia, is intimately familiar with the campaign in El Salvador and says that there are lessons for Americans to learn from it. For one thing, as Euteneuer sees it, the Salvadoran experience shows that all moves to expand abortion rights are pushed through by "elite" institutions of government (the U.S. Supreme Court, for example); by contrast, Euteneuer contends, when the laws are tightened, a grass-roots campaign is inevitably responsible. "El Salvador is an inspiration," he told me recently, an important victory in what he called "the counterrevolution of conscience."

Don't have the stomach to wade through the nine grisly pages? Listen to Hitt being interviewed about his piece by Air America's Rachel Maddow here.

Now, so as not to leave you on too despairing a note, there is positive action: get out there and write, call, pass it along. Support Sen. Barbara Boxer and Rep. Jerrold Nadler's Freedom of Choice Act.

It's time to stop talking in euphemisms and start pointing out explicitly what the reality is.