Inter-American Court of Human Rights Decriminalizes Infanticide

By | January 27, 2022

NEW YORK, January 27 (C-Fam) Manuela ripped the umbilical cord of her newborn baby boy and then threw him into a latrine to die by suffocation in excrement. That was thirteen years ago. Manuela was convicted of her crime. And then she became a heroine of abortion groups around the world and has been set free after winning an international legal case.

Not only has she been set free, the Inter-American Court of Human Rights ordered El Salvador to provide Manuela and her family reparations for her prosecution and incarceration in a ruling issued last month. The court said El Salvador’s abortion laws were not directly implicated in the case, since Manuela was convicted of homicide, but the laws were nonetheless indirectly responsible for the mistreatment of women who sought medical attention for “obstetric emergencies.”

The court’s sentence described the strict abortion laws of El Salvador as part of a pattern of systemic gender discrimination rooted in El Salvador’s pro-life laws and law enforcement protocols.

The Inter-American Court ultimately told El Salvador to revise its infanticide laws, which currently allow the imposition of the full 30-to-50-year prison sentence foreseen in cases of homicide. Manuela had been sentenced to the minimum 30 years when she was found guilty of infanticide in 2008. But the court didn’t stop there.

The court ordered the government of the Central American country to revise all its laws, and its medical and prosecutorial standards to comply with international “gender” norms. This may be read as including the country’s abortion laws, which are referred to explicitly and repeatedly. The court cited the pressure of UN experts and UN committees on El Salvador to liberalize its abortion laws as evidence of systemic gender discrimination.

The court also said that the legislature of El Salvador could not block the implementation of the court’s ruling, and that the executive branch of the government was responsible for implementing the ruling by decree, if the legislature did not act. In other words, the Inter-American Court implied that its rulings were self-executing and did not require any implementing measure by the legislature.

The only dissenting justice of the Inter-American Court, Eduardo Vio Grossi of Chile, insisted the ruling of the court could not affect El Salvador’s abortion laws, since those were not implicated in the case.

The case concluded a multi-year campaign by abortion groups to conflate miscarriages, in the earlier months of pregnancy, with infanticide, the deliberate killing of a newly born child in the late stages of pregnancy. Abortion groups argued that so long as abortion is penalized, then women who miscarry may be prosecuted for infanticide.

The abortion groups were so successful in confusing infanticide with miscarriages that the New York Times was forced to retract a story in 2006. C-Fam reviewed photographic evidence in nine cases pending in El Salvador in 2015 and found that none of the cases involved prosecutions for miscarriages. They involved full term babies that had been strangled, their skull pierced, and their throats slit. In the Manuela case, the baby she abandoned to die in a latrine was carried to term, according to the medical evidence presented in court.

The reparations provided Manuela and her family include scholarships for her previously born children and medical and psychological treatment for post-traumatic stress.

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