To stop the Zika virus, El Salvador is removing a woman’s right to choose
This is the first time a country’s asking everyone to stop having sex
By Asher Kohn
The Zika virus has El Salvador’s government terrified enough to suggest to Salvadoran women that they not get pregnant. Medical researchers around the world are scrambling to understand how the Zika virus in pregnant mothers is connected to microcephaly, but the government of this Central American country of 6 million is taking no risks. Or rather it is shifting all risk onto Salvadoran women.
If you want to see what a country looks like when abortion is a crime, look no further than El Salvador. The country has made it a legal imperative that its women get pregnant. Now that doing so might spark an epidemic, all Salvadoran officials can do is ask men and women to kindly not get it on.
El Salvador’s anti-choice laws are rooted not in Catholicism, but control. The country was reliant on coffee plantations to fuel its economy since its independence from Spain in the 19th century until the economy diversified in the 1960s. Plantations require lots of labor but don’t allow for a lot of freedom, so Salvadoran landowners promoted child-rearing but not access to education among their female workers. The men produced coffee, and the women produced men.
The landowners could pull this off because there were only 14 families in control of the coffee plantations and therefore, 95% of the entire economy. It wasn’t like women, tired of abuse, could pick up and find better conditions elsewhere. From 1931 until 1981, El Salvador was under a military regime whose primary purpose was keeping farmers in place and under landowners’ thumbs.
This military-economic control was tested by a civil war that lasted from 1979 to 1992. Guerillas inspired by Catholic Liberation Theology and funded by the Soviet Union fought the Salvadoran government and paramilitary organizations. The US worked with the government and trained paramilitary squads who killed non-combatants and used rape as a weapon.
Women suffered greatly during the civil war, but won few rights after the 1992 Chapultepec Accords ended the conflict with a power-sharing agreement. In fact, one of the few things that the former Cold War combatants could agree upon was a 1998 law that banned abortion in all circumstances, even rape. Since then, 129 women have been prosecuted under the law for aggravated murder. Prosecutors find even late-term miscarriages suspicious — 30 of these women, according to human rights groups, didn’t even know they were pregnant.
The Pill, condoms, and IUDs are all expensive and hard to come by in the impoverished nation, and young Salvadoran women have largely chosen permanent sterilization instead. A 2004 study showed that nearly a fourth of Salvadoran women under 30, including those who already mothers, have undergone tubal ligation, a complicated and, frankly, dangerous sterilization procedure. From 2005 to 2008, according to the Guttmacher Institute, there were about 35,000 clandestine abortions in El Salvador. About 11% of these illegal operations ended in the death of the pregnant woman.
In El Salvador, a woman’s right to choose is largely limited to four options: try to have a child, never have sex (even with a husband), undergo life-altering surgery, or become a criminal. In order to combat the Zika virus, El Salvador is asking women to drop the first choice for a couple of years at least. Because of decades of violence and state control, the options available to women are limited and potentially dangerous.
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