MANAGUA, Nicaragua -- Jazmina Bojorge arrived at Managua's Fernando Vélez Paiz Hospital on a Tuesday evening, nearly five months pregnant and racked with fever and abdominal pain. By the following Thursday morning, both the pretty 18-year-old and the female fetus in her womb were dead.
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But a week before her death on Nov. 2, Nicaragua's legislature had voted to ban all abortions, eliminating long-standing exceptions for rape, malformation of the fetus and risk to the life or health of the mother. Now, outraged opponents of the legislation have declared Bojorge its first victim.
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With the exception of Cuba, every nation in this predominantly Catholic region either totally prohibits abortion or limits it to extreme circumstances. And while the global trend over the past decade has been to liberalize abortion laws, efforts to do so in Latin America have been met by an equally determined campaign to strengthen them further.
So far, the anti-abortion camp's greatest triumph has been in El Salvador, where in 1998, at the public urging of San Salvador's Archbishop Fernando Saenz Lacalle, lawmakers removed all exceptions to the nation's ban on abortion and increased penalties to up to 50 years' imprisonment.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/11/27/AR2006112701577.html?referrer=email