A UN agency is using the parole of a woman in El Salvador who murdered her newborn to push for the legalization of abortion in the Central American country, claiming the woman was unjustly imprisoned for “an obstetric emergency.”
Marina de Los Angeles Portillo was recently granted parole after serving 14 years of her 35-year sentence for the 2007 killing of her newborn daughter.
The Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR) released a statement celebrating “the early release granted to Marina Portillo, who was prosecuted and sentenced after facing an obstetric emergency and after fourteen years … has the possibility of reuniting with her family” — minus one daughter, of course.
OHCHR went on to request that El Salvador “continue the review of cases where women have been detained for crimes related to obstetric emergencies and to harmonize the abortion legislation according to human rights standards.”
By “harmonize the abortion legislation according to human rights standards,” OHCHR means that abortion-on-demand should be the law of the land.
In El Salvador, however, the nation’s constitution declares “every human being … a human person from the moment of conception,” and thus abortion is prohibited.
But Portillo’s case had nothing to do with abortion. As Sara Larin, founder of the pro-life VIDA SV Foundation of El Salvador, told the Peru-based Catholic news agency ACI Prensa, “it is completely unusual and despicable that [OHCHR] is using … Portillo’s release from prison on parole to pressure El Salvador on abortion.”
Although OHCHR claims Portillo was sent to prison for an “obstetric complication,” Larin said “the newborn girl was actually found strangled with socks, one in her mouth and the other tied around her neck with a double knot.” Her body had been wrapped in a blanket and stuffed into a black plastic bag.
According to the Catholic News Agency:
Larín told ACI Prensa that “we at Fundación VIDA SV Foundation have Marina Portillo’s complete file available on our website and the conviction states that the forensic exam determined that the baby had lesions (signs of strangulation) when she was already alive outside the womb.”
“We have also published the ruling of the Supreme Court of Justice denying the request for pardon made by the pro-abortion lobby in 2015 in which the court responded to each one of the reasons presented by the feminists, clearly stating there is no relationship between this case of strangulation and an obstetric complication,” she added.
Portillo’s parole should not be taken as an acquittal, VIDA SV said. It simply means she fulfilled the necessary legal requirements for parole, something any inmate can do.
“The UN is one step away from openly calling for the legalization of newborn infanticide,” declared Larin.
This is not the first time abortion activists have twisted the facts of a case to further their cause in El Salvador.
In 2006, the New York Times, trying to make the case that women in El Salvador were being imprisoned for obtaining abortions (they weren’t and aren’t), reported that Salvadoran Carmen Climaco had been sentenced to 30 years for procuring an abortion. In fact, she was sentenced for strangling her newborn — a point the Times conceded only after LifeSiteNews brought the truth to light.
In the so-called Manuela case, the New York-based Center for Reproductive Rights claims that in 2008 a Salvadoran woman was sentenced to 30 years for a miscarriage that authorities thought was an abortion. (She ended up dying of cancer after two years behind bars.) Although that was the woman’s story, the baby was found in a latrine “asphyxiated from inhaling feces and bled out from the violent way her umbilical cord was yanked from the base,” Julia Regina de Cardenal, president of the Yes to Life Foundation of El Salvador, told ACI Prensa in April.
All told, abortion activists claim 17 women are in prison in El Salvador for miscarriages and “obstetric complications” that were prosecuted as abortions. However, said de Cardenal, “the medical and forensic evidence … shows full-term babies strangled, stabbed, stoned, thrown in septic tanks, etc.”
But when your objective is to legalize the murder of the unborn — and perhaps even the born — what are a few fibs?
