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The minor interrupted a pregnancy, the product of sexual abuse by a neighbor, with the help of a teacher and activist, who was arrested for helping the 13-year-old girl. The case opens the debate on the decriminalization of abortion in Venezuela.
A 13-year-old girl who was sexually abused by a neighbor voluntarily terminated a 12-week pregnancy and sparked the debate over the decriminalization of abortion in Venezuela, where Justice jailed the woman who helped her and released the aggressor for lack of evidence.
The case has aroused outrage in a good part of public opinion that rejects the detention of Vanesa Rosales, the teacher and activist who facilitated abortion and who spent three months behind bars, Although she is now under house arrest awaiting a trial that could end up condemning her to 12 years in prison.
The issue is so controversial, that there are still few who dare to speak out openly, without hiding behind the wall of social networks, where the most extreme reactions did not wait.
But if a pregnancy in a 13-year-old girl always carries some unavoidable inconveniences due to immaturity -both physical and psychological of the pregnant woman-, in Venezuela, they are aggravated, as a result of the living conditions of the majority of citizens, who live in misery and no signs of improvement in the near future.
If the minor had belonged to a family with economic possibilities, would the same have happened? Would she have had an abortion in this way or had other options been sought in the hands of specialists? And, what is still equally important: had there been a complaint? Would the news have been known or would it remain private?
Sexual abuse of a minor
The girl, whose identity remains hidden, was repeatedly raped by a 52-year-old man who lived in the same favela, located in the Andean state of Mérida (west).
The youngest became pregnant and it wasn’t until she was three months pregnant that she got a pill to interrupt her pregnancy. There Rosales enters the scene, an educator whom the girl and her mother had known for years, the time she has dedicated to social work in poor communities in that region.
The teacher, at the request of the victim’s mother, gave them the abortifacient and it was ingested in early October., for the girl, who suffered a bleeding typical of the case, for which she ended up in a public hospital, where they performed a curettage.
The girl’s mother, who at the time had gone to a police station to report the rape, ended up arrested and accused of attending an abortion, although she was released 22 days later.
Still hospitalized the girl was forced to declare. He said that his teacher had provided him with the medicine, a testimony that served to imprison the activist for 90 days but not to keep the aggressor behind bars, who was arrested and released in less than 48 hours, as flagrante delicto could not be proven.
Abort, worse than rape
Rosales is accused of the crimes of association to commit a crime and for causing the abortion of a woman with her consent, one of the causes established by Venezuelan legislation to punish the interruption of pregnancy, a prohibited scenario even when the fetus is unviable or the pregnancy is the product of rape.
The authorities, according to information released by local media, accuse the activist of having charged for the supply of the pill and for allegedly possessing 600 doses of this type of medicine, an assertion that the defense denies and indicates as “false.”
“Vanesa has been working for the sexual and reproductive rights of women for many years (…) she never charged for anything,” Venus Faddoul, a defense attorney for the teacher, tells Efe that, according to a medical review, the fetus “He was condemned to die” because the girl “did not have a developed uterus.”
The termination of pregnancy was not applied in the hospital on the day that the minor underwent a medical check-up, explains the jurist, because the laws prohibit these procedures and, although some are carried out underground, the impoverishment of public hospitals and the The COVID-19 pandemic played against the girl.
Thus, Faddoul continues, the victim, who lives in extreme poverty, was re-victimized by being denied the right to health, by facing the taboos against abortion in Venezuela and being in the middle of a judicial system that “ignores the need for a gender perspective” in these cases.
Abortion in Venezuela
Although Vanesa was arrested on October 12, 2020, it was not until this January that her case resonated at the top, with dozens of human rights organizations and personalities, some linked to the Government, calling for her immediate release.
“This is the breaking point to put the issue of decriminalization in Venezuela to swear (by force), because they have never allowed it to be put forward by more efforts made by the feminist movement,” says Faddoul, who says she is convinced ” do not lower your guard ”.
The fight, he maintains, seeks to ensure that the country decriminalize, at least, the three humanitarian causes for the voluntary interruption of pregnancy: rape, unfeasibility of the fetus and danger of the mother’s life, the latter allowed in theory but without an established protocol.
Decriminalization debate may get a door for the first time in Parliament Or, at least, so said the president of the Chamber, Jorge Rodríguez, who, with less than two weeks in office, indicated that “complex” issues such as abortion “surely” will be discussed, although he did not add details about it.
Meanwhile, Vanesa is still in danger of being sentenced for helping a girl she saw born and raised, the same girl who today feels guilty for having put her teacher in that position. And the attacker remains at large, albeit with an Interpol red alert that was issued a month after being released from prison.
Venezuela has one of the most restrictive laws on abortion. The 2020 Penal Code criminalizes abortion, except when there are threats to the woman’s health.
