In Latin America, a faulty forensic test is sending women to prison for killing their newborns.
Desde México hasta Argentina, los fiscales se han basado en la prueba docimasia hidrostática para condenar a las mujeres por matar a sus bebés.
The surge in such prosecutions in El Salvador, which began in the late 1990s, grew out of a militant antiabortion movement, Viterna said, and has been driven not by evidence but rather a widespread belief among authorities that the women wanted to escape the responsibilities of motherhood. While Guadalupe awaits a decision in the murder case, she lives in a small house with her father and four dogs and is studying to be an elementary school teacher.
Dr. Lee Marie Tormos, a medical examiner in Palm Beach County, Fla., who reviewed the case for The Times, said the bruise could have occurred during a traumatic birth and “in and of itself does not explain a dead baby.” Figuring out whether a baby was born alive is a complicated endeavor that experts say should involve a host of tests, including an examination of the lungs under a microscope to see if the air sacs are uniformly dilated. X-rays can also be useful for showing if air is evenly distributed in the lungs.The medical examiner in Guadalupe’s case did not mention either test in her autopsy report or in her statement to prosecutors.
“Many times my colleagues have to resort to the test that’s most used, which is the flotation test,” he said.Courts in multiple countries have exonerated women after determining that too much weight had been given to the flotation test. Based on that review, a higher court ruled in 2013 that there had been no proof the infant had been born alive and ordered Viera released.
Maria Teresa Rivera, sentenced to 40 years in prison, was exonerated after a court recognized that not enough tests were done to prove that her baby was born alive.Feeling dizzy, she headed to the bedroom she shared with her former partner’s mother. The last thing she remembers is the older woman finding her on the floor.“They tell me I’m detained because I had killed my son,” she said. “I said I hadn’t killed anyone.
The court ordered Rivera’s release, saying, “We can’t be irresponsible and limit the fundamental right of freedom with tests that are unreliable.” That appears to have been the case after Isabel Hernandez Contreras gave birth at her home about an hour outside San Salvador in 2013. In 2008, her mother found her unconscious in their home in a village in northeastern El Salvador. After doctors at a hospital determined she had delivered a baby, one of them alerted authorities, who found the decomposing body of her infant son in a septic tank.
The ruling energized activists who have been working to help imprisoned women who say they’ve been wrongly convicted.In Argentina, Natalia Saralegui Ferrante, a law professor at the University of Buenos Aires who has looked for women by searching judicial sentences online for “fetus” and other keywords, hopes authorities will take greater interest in finding more cases and correcting injustices.
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