The following story is adapted from a column published by the Center for American Progress on Dec. 11.

By Marta María Blandón
Central America Director, Ipas
Managua, Nicaragua

When “Maria” (not her real name) recently entered a Nicaraguan hospital, three months pregnant and bleeding heavily, doctors said they couldn’t treat her miscarriage.

Because their ultrasound machine was broken, they couldn’t determine whether she had truly miscarried — and any attempt to treat a miscarriage without such proof could expose the patient and her physician to accusations of inducing an abortion and possible prosecution.

Denying such treatment is likely to become routine in Nicaragua, where on Nov. 17 the outgoing president, Enrique Bolaños, signed a law that eliminated the only legal circumstance in which induced abortion was permitted: to protect a woman’s life or health.

Women in Nicaragua face this grim reality. Under the law, Maria’s medical emergency would go untreated, exposing her to life-threatening infection, fertility loss and emotional trauma.

Denying necessary medical care — including abortion care — goes against basic human decency and violates women’s human rights. Nearly 6,700 women are hospitalized every year in Nicaragua with complications from spontaneous and induced abortions. For such women, the new law can mean a death sentence.

El Salvador passed a similar ban in 1997. As a result, some clinicians have delayed the provision of treatment to women with medical emergencies believed to have resulted from induced abortion. Instead, they have chosen to call the police first, fearful that they too could be prosecuted if they didn’t inform against their patient. It’s a choice no health care provider should ever have to make.

The law that Bolaños signed was introduced and passed under pressure from conservative Catholic and evangelical leaders. Members of the National Assembly ignored the petitions of human rights and women’s groups in Nicaragua, as well as international health experts and diplomats who warned that this law would endanger women’s health and survival. When I and other advocates for women sought an audience with members of the National Assembly, we were ignored. When we tried to attend the debate on the floor of the Assembly, we were physically barred from the building, while local church leaders who supported the ban were welcomed.

By enacting this law, the Nicaraguan government has made a statement that they believe women’s lives are less valuable than a fetus, or even a fertilized egg. This is what the Vatican, which has publicly vowed to dismantle therapeutic abortion across Latin America, considers a “victory.” We call denying women essential, life-saving health care and robbing them of participation in civil society gross violations of basic human rights.

International human rights bodies have established that denying women access to safe abortion care violates their human rights. Research has definitively shown that abortion bans do not decrease the number of abortions — they only drive them underground and make them unsafe. This happened in the United States before Roe v. Wade, it is happening in El Salvador, and it will now happen in Nicaragua.

The Nicaraguan government has brazenly ignored this evidence. And it has so far been unresponsive to an official statement issued late last month by the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights, which said that the Nicaraguan law runs counter to several important world agreements to which Nicaragua is a signatory, including the Convention on the Elimination of Discrimination Against Women.

It would be easy to dismiss this extreme law as tragic but ultimately the internal affair of a sovereign nation. But this abortion ban is a sign of the growing influence of politically conservative, often religious, forces that are chipping away at women’s reproductive rights in the United States, Nicaragua and elsewhere.

The Nicaraguan government has chosen to turn its back on women and their doctors, and to violate women’s basic human rights. Nonetheless, my hope for the coming new year is that the Nicaraguan government will listen, finally, to the rationale voices of human rights advocates and others, and reverse itself on a law with such devastating consequences for women like Maria and their families.