Claims of a right to infanticide are being adjudicated this week [1] in a case before the Inter-American Court of Human Rights.
The Court is the judicial institution of the Organization of American States (OAS) and is the equivalent of the Strasbourg Court for the states of the American continent. It interprets and enforces the American Convention on Human Rights in states party to that Convention.
The case was prompted by a woman named Manuela who went to a hospital claiming to have had a miscarriage. However, an autopsy revealed that the child had been murdered after birth. Manuela was sentenced in August 2008 to thirty years in prison, not for abortion but for the murder of her son.
Manuela is part of a group known as “las 17 +”, more than seventeen women convicted of infanticide in El Salvador. NGOs conducted a political and media campaign based on these women’s stories, claiming that infanticide of their children was their only solution, due to the abortion ban and their economic and social conditions.
According to the European Centre for Law and Justice, the court will rule on two questions: Does the right to privacy imply the recognition of a “right to abortion”? And, Is there such a “right to abortion” even after birth, i.e. a right to kill a newborn baby?