El Salvador frees three women convicted for suspected abortions

Court commutes sentences of three women who say they were prosecuted after suffering miscarriages, obstetric emergencies Ilopango, El Salvador – Alba Lorena Rodriguez embraced her 11- and 14-year-old daughters as a free woman for the first time in nearly a decade on Thursday. Two other women sentenced for suspected abortions – Maria del Transito Orellana, and Cinthia Marcela Rodriguez – were also released in the latest win for women’s rights activists fighting to loosen the country’s strict abortion laws. “Our responsibility as women who have been released is to stand up and demand that the Salvadoran state release all the women.” Efforts to decriminalise abortion through the country’s legislative assembly have been unsuccessful. They believe their “strategic litigation” has established an important legal precedent to increase equal access to justice in the country – and that it will lead to the eventual release of all the women imprisoned in relation to the country’s total abortion ban, according to a recent press release.