Peruvian Teen In Wheelchair After Denied A Medically-Necessary Abortion

It’s not just in Poland: When a thirteen-year-old Peruvian girl was raped and impregnated, she jumped out of the window in despair. She was denied both proper treatment for her injuries and an abortion, as she discusses in this video.

LC: I Have To Tell What Happened To Me from Center for Reproductive Rights on Vimeo.

L.C., who lives in poverty near Lima, was raped repeatedly by a 34-year-old man. When she told him she was pregnant, he denied it could be his, which led to her suicide attempt. After she was finally found by neighbors and taken the hospital, doctors refused to operate because she was pregnant. They also refused to perform an abortion, despite the fact that in Peru, it is legal to save a woman’s life, and her family petitioned for one. L.C. later miscarried, and it took four months for her to be granted the surgery she needed, by which time it was too late to do much good.

The Center For Reproductive Rights is litigating her case, arguing that Peru is in violation of its own constitution as well as international treaties.

Last week, we wrote about a Polish woman who died after being “turned away by successive doctors who each refused to explain the real reason for the decision – ‘that treating the disease could result in a miscarriage or could force an abortion.'” Both cases indicate the broader thinking that a woman’s life and health is subordinate to what’s gestating inside of her — and how the individual choices of doctors, in a context where abortion is routinely vilified, can easily subvert official policy.