 OK, thank you all for sticking with us. I recognize that we just had a good meal, and it's a dark room, and most of the audience is jet lag. And so I'm like, we'll try to keep you on your own. There we go. I had that planned to keep you all the way. Anyway, my name's Jocelyn Vaterna. I'm a sociologist from Harvard University, and I've spent about 20 years working in El Salvador, oftentimes working with lawyers who work on various human rights issues. And both of my colleagues that I wrote with are human rights lawyers in El Salvador. Jose Santos is here with me today. He has actually now been on both sides of the aisle after working as a human rights attorney. He has been hired by the fiscal in El Salvador, which is like the attorney general's office that does the prosecuting. And so he can talk to us a little bit about both sides. But the story is that although I have, through all these years of working in El Salvador, I sort of have split personalities. And that I'll help the activists on the ground write a paper, maybe some sort of a brief to support some sort of political change on the ground. But those papers have nothing to do with my, they have little to do with sort of my career. And then I write papers that support my career and make theoretical contributions to sociology, but those aren't very useful on the ground. So when I got the call for papers here, I thought, wow, this could be a really interesting opportunity, because it said that there was this going to be a push to make sure these results get into the hands of key policymakers. And I thought, we're going to write this paper together. We're going to think about how to actually promote some sort of change. And I have to say, every time I've tried to write this paper, it's ended up feeling very flimsy and disconnected. So I think I'm pretty good at writing an academic paper, but writing something that has more policy recommendations makes me feel like I'm in my first year of graduate school. So I'm really looking forward to your thoughts as to how we can pull all of this, I think, very interesting and important data together into something that is a little more readable than what I have right now. So this is a question we're starting out with. Existing strategies for reforming gender bias state institutions have often failed to make a noticeable difference for Salvador women's judicial rights. Why? And can we think about what to try next? So before I get there, I'll just go through the literature a little bit. So in the 1980s and into the 1990s, a lot of studies of development sort of found institutions. Again, this went along with a big trend in the literature of bringing the state back in. And so we learned that institutions were important for good institutions were associated with good development. And by good institutions, people had a lot of different variations. Did the institutions protect private property? Did they encourage multiple perceptions to be heard by policymakers? Did they lead to universal education or a lack of corruption? And a lot of these studies focused on formal legal institutions. And they looked at the outcomes. Did the institutions do this? But not so much the process of how they did that. And it was very interdisciplinary and sometimes not very helpful, I would say. For example, the Shea Mokul and Robinson piece that's gotten a lot of attention sort of says, if you didn't have good institutions in the colonial times, you're just sort of screwed for the rest of your country's existence. But moving into the 1990s, particularly in sociology and in political science, more than the 2000s, we start to have people who talk about feminist institutionalism. And here, people ask questions about why do these institutions continue to affect the daily lives of women and men differently? Why do institutions reproduce or exasperate patterns of disadvantage even when there's formally espousing ideas of equality? So again, the difference here with what the feminists are doing is that they're not just looking at the outcomes of institutions, but they're looking at the processes within institutions. And it also has a very sort of activist component in that this literature is really looking at questions of how can we think about institutional innovation reform in ways that will encourage gender equality and gender justice? So there we go. I've got too many computers going. So this is the literature that we want to contribute to. So before we get there, what do we think is an institution? Political scientists have talked a lot about the rules of the game, both formal and informal, in which political actors operate. And there's often sort of an emphasis on the structural here. Sociologists, when they talk about institutions, oftentimes do it more thinking about firms as well as states. And they see these as more sort of durable structures of shared knowledge. They're thoroughly cultural. Orlando Patterson tells us that when we think of the rules of the game for institutions, we shouldn't just include the formal policies and procedures, but we should understand the cultural norms and the practices that set the expectations for individuals' behaviors. Because institutions are shaped by social, political, and cultural environments in which they are embedded. And that embeddedness is actually really important, because if an institution isn't embedded in those social, and political, and cultural environments, it won't be able to act. It won't be able to make its actions intelligible to the societies it's working in. And again, then, when the feminist institutionalism looks at here, what they bring attention to is the very gendered nature of these power settlements. And they focus heavily on how activists and policymakers can try to reform them. All right. One thing through all this institutional literature that everyone agrees on is that institutions are really slow to change. Even if we change the law, it's hard to change the practice of how people go about doing that, or how people go about enforcing the laws. So what are the mechanisms by which state institutions shape gender? Here's one framework that's out there about the different ways that gender has effects through institutions. One of my more preferred ways to think about this is actually Lisa Brush wrote a book in 2003 called The Gender of Governance and the Governance of Gender. And what she tells us is that when we talk about the gender of governance, we talk about the fact that most states have been historically created by men in a very masculine environment, and that has historical consequences, or continuous consequences. But when we talk about the governance of gender, it's more this idea that states govern gender in both direct and indirect ways. So directly, states use the categories of men and women to dictate things like who can vote, who could go to school, who can marry whom, who has the right to control, their sexual and reproductive behavior, who could be drafted into the military, and things like that. But states also indirectly shape gender in countless ways. Social welfare programs define what constitutes a family, whether or not parental leave programs exist, can shape expectations of parenthood in the household. Different kinds of child care facilities can either mitigate or support women's access to paid labor. Public health care systems can determine who can control their own sexual health and reproduction. The drugs that they can use and these types of things all have these indirect effects on gender. So to summarize, because gender equality requires state institutions to act as sort of impartial arbiters of legal rights and opportunities, institutional feminists believe that they really can't escape the need to target the state for reform. They're not the only ones, it's not the only idea out there. There are feminists who think that the state's irredeemable and we should just not deal with it. But institutional feminists say, we really need institutions, they're critical. But because we need the institutions, they've really focused heavily on reforming institutions through both structural and cultural change. And so a lot of the works in this literature talks about can we create women's agencies and states to help with gender mainstreaming? Can we have legislative quotas to make sure there's greater representation of women in state institutions? Can we reform sexist criminal and civil codes? Can we pass new laws that are more modern that help us deal with gender-based violence? One of the big things that institutional feminist institutionalists recommend is how can we change the way people act within these institutions? And so we have lots of trainings, I'm sure, gender sensitivity trainings for judges and doctors and everyone else to help them see how they should act in ways that will reduce gender bias. So what are the results of this? Overwhelmingly, we've had gains in a lot of the formal measures, right? We have better laws on the books. We do have these women's agencies. We have greater women's representation in politics. But in most of the qualitative studies out there, they tell you that the on-the-ground stories are a lot bleaker because these norms and practices that comprise state institutions are themselves steeped in deep gender biases and it's very difficult to change them. And this is very true even in institutions that have been heavily reformed by some of these formal processes. And the country that I work in most of El Salvador is a case in point. They have a very modern law against domestic violence. They have a modern family law. They have the women's agency. They have high rates of women's political participation and participation in the labor force. They've had massive reductions in fertility over time. And when you look at measures like the OECDs, measure of gender in institutions, you find that it actually has a very low ranking for low bias in its institutions. But when you look inside the institution, the situation is a lot bleaker. So I'm gonna talk about what is inside these institutions in two cases. The first case I'm just going to talk about briefly because of time. And that is the case of gender-based violence. So activists and politicians have worked together to really improve the law in El Salvador. And there's a very modern, very excellent anti-domestic violence or anti-gender-based violence law on the books in El Salvador. There also has been a program to start what they call Ciudad Mujeres, or women's cities that are located throughout the country. So if a woman has a problem that she needs to report a domestic violence case, they can go to these women's cities and they get all of their resources right there. And yet, when it comes to actually prosecuting the perpetrators of domestic violence, we still find that the legal system in El Salvador is remarkably biased. So Sylvia, one of my co-authors who's not here today actually has led a lot of those gender training. She's excellent at it. And she'll talk about how when she sits there, people roll their eyes and laugh and don't take it very seriously and how frustrating that is. And then she also has represented a lot of women who've gone to court against their partners or someone who is being abusive to them. And she has just incredible stories. For example, one time a judge actually held up the Bible and said to her, do you know that God made women out of men's ribs, out of Adam's rib, and therefore you have to obey and go home? Santos, my colleague here, when he was being trained on how to be a fiscale, one of the first cases he saw from the prosecution side was a woman came in, had been a huge laceration on her arm with 20 stitches, had big bruises on her neck and told a story about how her partner had beaten her severely the night before and was repeatedly threatening to kill her. And so the man, after admonishing her several times for doing things that made her partner angry, including the fact that her partner was significantly younger than she was. He's like, oh yeah, you should know better than that. Then sent her off to the medical examiner the medical examiner to see how severe the lesions were because it depends under the law if they're going to be discapacitate you for five days or 10 days and these types of things. But he put the charge down as domestic violence with lesions, which is something that is just very commonly done. It's what everybody accepts in the fiscale and the attorney general's office of El Salvador is what you do. Even though there could have been a good case in this situation for say attempted murder, right? She had strangulation marks around her neck but nobody ever goes there. There are systems, there are possibilities within the system to put that man in jail even in the short term to give the woman security but that kind of security never happens, right? Women are sent home, men are not detained and there's no way that we can protect women from continuing violence. So the point here I think is fairly common in the literature and that is the fact that even though we've put all these modern sort of structural systematic changes in place the implementation of the law still really sucks for women. That's our more typical case. But we also have this case and I should say we have quite a bit of data on this, right? So we have a lot of the court cases from the women that the women have given us. I think we have nine cases of domestic violence where we can see this kind of gender bias throughout the reports. So each case has about 500 pages. We can see where the gender bias happens at the level of the police, at the level of the prosecuting attorney, at the level of the judge and so on and so forth. But there's another case that I think it's really helps us think about this idea of how we can reform institutions to be better for women and that is what the case of what we're calling abortion related homicides or fetal homicides. And to understand abortion related homicides we have to give you a little bit of a history of the abortion situation in El Salvador. So for hundreds of years El Salvador has had abortion be illegal but they've had a few cases where it's not illegal, a few cases where it's okay. It's been okay when the women's life was in danger because of the pregnancy, when the fetus had deformities incompatible with extra uterine life and when the pregnancy was the result of rape. Now in El Salvador there was a big civil war in the 1980s between a leftist communist party and the authoritarian right wing presidency or government controlled by the, given lots of money by the United States. But in 1992 the civil war ended with a negotiated settlement and there was this moment through the negotiated settlement, it was negotiated through the United Nations where the state was required to write a new criminal code. And there's some very interesting things here about why but in 1994 a powerful pro-life movement was launched and it's very much the same people who had talked about the evils of communism are now talking about the evils of abortion. And when you read newspaper articles about this it's fascinating, right? People will talk about how those communa, the FMLN is a communist party that wants to get rid of private property and want to abort your babies, right? It all kind of goes together in these, the minds. But this, by powerful pro-life movement one of the things that I find so interesting about this case is we often think of social movements as something that poor people do because they can't access real state power, right? It's supposed to be a weapon of the weak. But in this case the massive mobilization was led by some of the most powerful people in the country. The wealthiest people, the people who'd studied in the United States, the people who had very close ties with politicians, the people who had breakfast every other weekend with the Archbishop, these kinds of people. And in 1997, when the criminal code had to be rewritten they succeeded in a movement to take out all of those exceptions to abortion. So now in El Salvador there's no abortion, no exception not even if the woman's life is in danger. According to the rule of the law if a woman has an ectopic pregnancy where the embryo implants inside the fallopian tube the doctor should let that explode rather than operate because that would be killing a human life. In 1999, this law was made even stronger with the passage of a constitutional amendment. Now the first line of a constitution says that the Salvadoran state will protect life from the very moment of conception. So we now have to find human life, the very moment of conception. Another thing that's interesting about this case is that the feminists in El Salvador initially fought this horrific absolute ban on abortion. But over time, the FMLN, the party of the left came to the feminists and they said look we cannot get elected if we are seen as pro-abortion and we wanna support you and we want you to support us. So we'll make you a deal. We will be the party of the feminists, we will support feminist issues as long as you drop abortion. We'll support you on domestic violence legislation, we'll support you on ensuring that men pay child support if they're not in the house, we'll support you on equitable education, we'll support all those other issues but no talking about abortion. And there's a lot of internal debate in the feminists but there's an overwhelming agreement that at this moment they said okay, we're dropping the issue. So the feminists kind of went away. So an interesting thing happens there in that these pro-life people by the turn of the century, they've won everything, right? They have the criminal law passed, they have the constitutional amendment passed, they have all of the deputies signing symbolic books of life that say they won't try to change the abortion law. There's nobody talking against them, there's no pro-choice movement against whom to fight and yet they still get out of bed every day like trying to protect the lives of the unborn, right? That's their mission. And so what we see the pro-life movement do at this time, remember this very powerful pro-life movement was they actually turned to putting pressure on the legal system to prosecute abortion crimes. So they would talk about how look, there's all these clandestine abortion clinics happening, why are they still doing this? We need to go in, we need to shut this down and so on and so forth. And we actually see the legal system, remember these very slow to change institutions? Change like that, like everybody's dropping, trying to make sure they can prosecute abortions. There's some really interesting information, if you read the police or the newspaper articles on this, one of the cases I found most interesting was they actually sent an undercover female police officer into one of the clandestine abortion clinics. And she was not pregnant, but she said she was pregnant. The clandestine abortion doctor gave her an ultrasound, told her she was four months pregnant, told her how much it would cost. And when she literally got her feet up in the stirrups, ready to get the abortion, the police all came in and crashed and got them. But when the case went to the court, the prosecuting attorney got up and said, they were ready to give this police officer an abortion and she wasn't even pregnant. And the defense attorney said, small point, can you have an abortion if the woman's not even pregnant? So the case was dismissed. And this is the problem in a lot of situations. Abortion is a very, very difficult crime to prosecute, even if you want to. So this is such a fascinating article from 2001 because what you're seeing here is the woman at the bottom is the ombudsman for human rights, the head of the ombudsman's office. And the men, we have the head of the police and we have the attorney general. And the ombudsman's office is putting pressure on the police and the attorney general's office for prosecuting abortions more. And what they're saying is they're trying, but unless you actually passed a law that didn't make only abortion illegal, but the intention to abort illegal, their hands are really tied. So they're pushing for making the law even stronger so that they can catch these people who are aborting. So what we saw here, again, is that this movement started in about 1994. Within five years, they had huge legislative wins. They had, and they had the major leaders of major institutions in the state sort of falling all over themselves to change their prosecutorial procedures. Doctors were told that they had to report or they would be guilty of inciting abortion. Police began to think about the uterus as a crime scene to investigate. So we see this really dramatic transformation. Have a few, oh, guess that's not next. Okay, so just to give you an idea. Oh, sorry, let me back up. But what eventually happened when the police couldn't prosecute women for abortion, they finally found women they could prosecute. And those are women like Maria Teresa. These are women who essentially had stillbirths, had some sort of medical emergency. And when they were taken to the hospital, the doctors realized that they'd just given birth, but there was no baby, called the police and report them. Initially, they are reported for abortion. They start the trial for the crime of abortion. In the process of the trial, everybody realized there's absolutely no evidence that the women did anything to interrupt the pregnancy early. But instead of dismissing the case, the charge gets transformed into an aggravated homicide charge. Not just regular homicide, like what the gang members kill each other, they'd get 12 to 15 years or whatever, but aggravated homicide because of the relationship to the mother to the fetus, which gives them a 30 to 50 year sentence. So what does this look like? This is the story of Maria Teresa. This is the house that she lived in at the time of the rest. So Maria Teresa was a hardworking single mom. She had been raised in an orphanage in El Salvador because of the orphanage. She had a high school education, which was a little bit rare. She worked in a maquila fabric factory during the weekdays and then she took on extra work on the weekends in the evenings cleaning houses. She had a six year old son at the time that she was paying enough money to keep him in the Catholic mission school in the neighborhood, so he didn't have to go to the public schools that are highly controlled by gangs. So things were looking pretty good. In this house, she lived with her ex-companieros, parents. So even though Oscar's dad had left them, she had a really good relationship with the dad's parents and she stayed with them. And so when she worked, her mother-in-law would take care of Oscar in this house. Maria Teresa had a very short relationship with a man before she found out he was married and had another family and she cut it off. But she didn't know she was left pregnant by that relationship. She didn't know she was pregnant, in part because she continued bleeding regularly throughout the pregnancy. And in part because twice she went to the doctor to say, I'm feeling funny, right? Once she complained that she was having lower abdominal pains and they told her she had a bladder infection and they gave her some antibiotics. Another time she went and complained that she was having really strong back pains. And the doctor said it's probably because she's a very big chested woman and maybe she should think about a breast reduction surgery. So again, even the doctors didn't realize she was pregnant. I've talked to her neighbors in the community and the neighbors also, they didn't see signs of pregnancy, they didn't see her stomach growing. I've had OBGYNs and forensic anthropologists look at the case and they suggest that she probably had something called placental abruption. She means the placenta pulled away from the side, from the uterus, it detached so that the, that would account for the bleeding through the pregnancy and it would also account for the fact that the fetus didn't get enough nutrition so that the placenta and the fetus didn't grow and her stomach didn't look bigger either. But one night in November, according to all of her neighbors and her family, of course, she didn't, she looked totally fine. She ate dinner, she helped her son with her homework. And then, so this is one of those communities where everybody's walking around, everyone's outside, there's not a lot of privacy. And she went to bed and she woke up in the middle of the night with a strong urge, with a big thirst. So she went to get a drink of water and she felt the urge to defecate. So she goes outside to out here where the outdoor pit toilet, the latrine is and she goes to use the bathroom and she reports feeling like a little ball, a little ball, that fell out of her body. She stood up and she tried to call for her mother-in-law but she passed out in a pool of blood. Her mother-in-law heard her and came out and found her there and called the Red Cross to get an ambulance and the ambulance took her to the hospital. When they got to the hospital, Maria Teresa was very close to death. She had hypovolemic shock from blood loss. Her blood pressure was only 60 over 40 and she was fading in and out of consciousness. And the doctors kept seeing to Maria Teresa, where's the baby? Where's the baby? We can tell you just gave birth, where's the baby? And both Maria Teresa and her mother-in-law were saying, what baby? We don't know what you're talking about, what baby? But at this point then, the doctors called the police. The police went to investigate the crime scene of the latrine. They found the body of the fetus and she was arrested for abortion. Through the course of the trial, looking at the documents, again, I've read more forensic pathology textbooks than I ever thought I'd want to in my life and I've also talked to forensic pathologists and OBGYNs. And what I've learned is that a lot of the things that happened were kind of bogus in this. So for example, there's a lung flotation test that the doctors in El Salvador, the medical forensics office, typically used to prove that a baby was born alive, which is where they cut a piece of the lung from the cadaver and they put it in water. And if it floats, supposedly that means that the lungs had taken a breath and if it sinks, that means that the lungs did not and the baby was born dead. So there's two problems with this. One is that doctors in the developed countries have not used this test for many years because they say it generates false positives. There's a lots of other ways that air can get into those lungs, including if an autopsy's not done right away, there can actually be a future faction which puts gas into the lungs and makes them float. And many of these autopsies were done 30, 40, 50 hours after the cadaver's death and so there's a lot of problems there. The second problem with this test is even if a baby's born alive, it doesn't necessarily mean that it was killed, right? It could be born alive, take a few gas and then still die from natural causes. In the case of Maria Pérez, the autopsy says very clearly that there's no fecal matter in the mouth or in the nose. There's no sign at all that the baby ever took a breath and the people I've had talked to say they're very clear that the fetus was dead and died in utero. Nevertheless, and there's also just egregious things here like when it asked how much the fetus weighed on the autopsy, someone actually wrote noevascular. There's no scale. So they must have just sort of eyeballed it or something, right? So horrific sorts of violations of human rights. The charge of abortion, the charges were upgraded to aggravated homicide and Maria Pérez was sentenced to 40 years in prison. I'm happy to say that after five years we were able to win her a retrial and after much advocacy, after we got her out and went after five years in prison. So her son who was six when she went into prison was 11 when she got to see him again. So there's not a lot of great data on this but what I can tell you is that quantitatively, or quantitatively we know that El Salvador did not previously prosecute women for abortion. This is what everybody says. Santos did a lot of research in the archives. He went back to 1989 in five different districts that have high rates of prosecutions now and from 1989 to 1996 we don't see any prosecutions for abortion. So this has really changed afterwards. A feminist NGO collected some data and they found that in a 10-year period from 2020-10 at least 68 women were prosecuted for consensual abortion at some point. What Santos did was he went into 12 of the 21 judicial districts in El Salvador. We tried to get one from every region in the country and he looked through the sentencing guidelines. So this is a pretty conservative study because it only looks at cases that made it all the way to sentencing, not cases that might have been dismissed earlier. But we see that there's been an increase, again just in a little more than half of the districts, found 16 cases of abortion over this time period and 37 for fetal homicide of some parts and abortion that ended up becoming a homicide charge. So to look at this, of those 16 that were charged with abortion, 12 were given some sort of community service. The records are clear for three and one was given a four-year prison sentence and in this case it was very much one of these cases where it was another baby that was birthed into a latrine but the judge said that since basically she was guilty because even though he believed that the infant was dead before it was expelled she shouldn't have gone to the latrine when she was pregnant, was basically the argument. This is much more powerful. In the 37 homicide cases that we found, and again this is 12 of the 21 judicial districts, seven were innocent, three received a four-year prison sentence and all of these the judge admitted that the woman didn't do anything wrong but they gave her, almost see the copulso, kind of like manslaughter, right? Like it wasn't her fault that the baby died but the baby died and therefore even if it wasn't intentional she has to go to prison. The 12 to 15-year sentences are interesting. These are ones for attempted aggravated homicide. In both these cases the baby lived. In one of them, the woman named Mirna accidentally birthed into a latrine. She called her family for help and the family got the baby out and the baby lived. She's a 13-year-old girl now but one of the neighbors told the police they thought this woman was throwing away her baby and she ended up getting a 12 and a half-year sentence. But look at the large majority. 21 of these women had a 25 to 40-year sentence. So we see a change, it's a sort of a small end in El Salvador but it's a massive change. We go from not prosecuting abortions at all to prosecuting not only abortions but also this qualitative difference in that we're prosecuting now women who have stillbirths and of course it probably goes without saying the overwhelming majority of these women are very poor. They live in isolated areas. They don't have good access to medical care. They're often alone in their house when they go into labor and so the babies die through no fault of their own. In one case, for example, a woman who was only about six months pregnant went to pick up one of those, she was a domestic worker, pick up one of those heavy things full of wet laundry, those big plastic buckets and put it on her head and the baby fell out probably because she had cervical incompetence, right? And so she was scared and she hid the baby but when she then passed out later from blood loss the workers called the police. Okay, so we were able to get my notes here, written permission from 17 women who were in prison to review their entire cases through the NGO that's representing them and so we didn't have, whereas the most of them we just have these sentencing guidelines in these 17 cases we have every document. We have the police reports, we have the witness testimonies, we have the autopsy reports, we have the hospital intake forms and so on and so forth. So it's about 500 pages per case. And again, we reviewed them with a lot of different specialists, the forensic specialists, OBGYNs and some different lawyers to get it, all of these things. And what we found was that there was significant gender bias in every aspect of the judicial process. Starting with the police. Police now prioritize these investigations where they didn't before. In the past, if a fetus was found dead they'd just be like, we're never gonna be able to find out who did that, now they make it a very big priority. They often arrest women without any evidence of a crime and they write reports as if the women are guilty. So they'll say, you know, in this case, a Mirna who actually, whose daughter lived because her family get the baby out of the latrine, they actually wrote on the paper, Mirna launched her baby into the latrine, on South launched her baby into the latrine. And they oftentimes don't even go collect the evidence themselves. So if a woman, like the women particularly who had domestic, worked as domestics when they ended up at the hospital, they would just, the police would call the owners, say, hey, go look and see if you could find this cadaver. So there's not any concern about the crime scene. The hospitals, there's a clear pattern of information that went into the reports and it was all based toward incrimination. The hospitals would only evaluate whether or not a woman had given birth and whether or not she lied about giving birth. No mention of blood loss, no mention of possible acceptable emergencies, no analysis of placenta or the umbilical cord or anything like that. And we actually did find a case where they wrote on the medical file, a woman threw away her baby, which of course we can imagine affects the care they get as well as there, these documents go into the criminal record. Medical forensics was particularly horrific. I already talked about Maria Teresa's case. They used lung flotation tests that are not useful. And oftentimes when you see different kinds of medical complications in the autopsy, like there was missing, what's the word, vein in the umbilical cord or there was a heart congestive problem or something, those things never are suggested as possible reasons for a stillbirth. And then sometimes they would testify just to flagantly wrong information. So some of these doctors would testify that there's absolutely no way a woman could not know that she was pregnant or there's no way a woman could not know that she was in labor. That you absolutely should be able to differentiate feelings of needing to defecate with labor pains. Another person, there was interreder and growth restriction on the baby, which is a clear sign that there's probably some medical problem leading to stillbirth. And they argued that that intrareder and growth restriction was clear evidence that the mother did not want her child. So really difficult problems there. The attorney general's office, the fiscales would consistently frame all of their evidence as if the woman violently was killed by their, or the baby was violently killed by their own mother. And then there would be no information to support that. So for example, in the case of Karamind, they said there was absolutely no marks on the fetus. There were a lot of medical problems within the fetus's body. And when it came, there's a space on the attorney general where they have to say what the action was taken to commit the crime. And they just put an action, right? So they don't even know what she supposedly did. So there was a lot of problems there. In one case, a psychological report found the woman was in shock after the birth and probably didn't know what was going on. And the fiscale actually requested a new psychological report that then found that she was in a positive state of mind. So these are the kinds of things we saw regularly. The judges' sentencing was perhaps the thing that bothered me the most. They regularly made clear in their statements that women are guilty because they were bad mothers who failed to bring their babies to a healthy birth. They were guilty because they hit the pregnancy. They were guilty because they should have known they were pregnant or in labor. They were guilty because they didn't get help when they needed help. Often there was no evidence to support the crime, but they would say even given that there's no evidence, the circumstantial evidence is overwhelming and they would sentence people on that. But the biggest thing was that there was this real act about talking about women not fulfilling their natural role as a mother. This problem that women are naturally mothers and they weren't fulfilling their mothers. They were being perverse. So in Maria Teresa's case, for example, the judge said since the first person called to protect the life of a newborn as the mother, she's the first person in whom nature has deposited the procreation of life and the care to conserve this life, ultimately assuring that this life flourishes. The complete opposite occurred in this case, given that it was the mother herself who despite being the first obliged to protect this life was the one who destroyed it with her actions, right? So a lot of emphasis on this idea of being a bad mother. And just as a side note, something I'm looking on for another paper, this idea of a person mother was also paralleled in the media. You can see here the one article says crimes without punishment and introductory blurb says the numbers of newborns being thrown into latrines, trash receptacles, or vacant lots by their own mothers is alarming. The authorities need to capture these women red-handed to process them for aggravated homicide. But to the contrary, these crimes never come to light and are going to be in community, complete immunity. And then the story starts out, imagine yourself naked and tied at the hands and feet without being able to speak or see. Suddenly you feel yourself being thrown into a hole and upon falling to the bottom, you realize you're surrounded by feces and urine. Little by little, you begin to drown. Soon various insects and cockroaches began to climb on your body. Worms and rats begin to bite you pulling off your skin and nobody hears your painful cries, right? And there's actually a quote by the attorney general in here that says, they the moms don't want to abandon the babies, they want to kill them. And that's why they process them as aggravated homicide, not like an abortion, which sort of suggests that the difference between homicide and abortion is one of intent in some way. And it's not really surprising when you think about it because there's no definition for what it constitutes abortion in the law. But we know that life begins at the very moment of conception. So if you're a human being from the moment of conception and you die somewhere in the middle of the pregnancy, what's the difference between abortion and aggravated homicide? It's very fuzzy. I think this case calls into question some things that we think about feminist institutionalism. First of all, I think when we talk about feminist institutionalism, feminists always like to sort of measure it as if there is stagnation or improvement, right? So a study that Elizabeth Boyle did recently about abortion looked at, did countries stay the same or did they get better, right? But what are we missing by not looking at cases that actually regress? Institutions aren't always either stagnant or getting more progressive. Sometimes they regress. And that might change the way we think about things, both as a measurement problem, as well as maybe it would help us highlight some of the mechanisms that matter for institutional change. Secondly, I would say, we always say this, institutions might be slow, but are they only slow to progressive change? Maybe they can be really fast to regressive change and what do we make out of that? And there's also just to complicate this further, in Nicaragua, they have the same law in the book passed to 10 years later, no abortions, no exceptions. But in Nicaragua, the doctors are still giving women abortions when they need them and nobody has gone to jail because the doctors don't report and the police don't prosecute. So what does that tell us about institutional differences as well? And so that, okay, that's my third point then. So how do we theorize the difference between laws on the book and laws in practice when the laws on the book are actually horrifically biased? So in El Salvador, we might say this law is bad, but it's made even worse by the institutions, right? So what we normally talk about with institutionalism is we have really good laws on the book, but people don't enforce them, like with domestic violence. But in this case, we have laws on the book, but they're actually made worse by domestic violence or by the institution. And again, if we look at Nicaragua, we'd say, all right, the Nicaraguan feminists will tell you, don't come try to change the law in our country because nobody's paying attention to the fact that it won't be enforced. And if we start being active about trying to change this law, then we're afraid that people are going to start paying attention to what's happening. They call themselves the silent resistance. They go into hospitals and they hand out vacuum aspiration machines so the doctors can do their abortions and stuff, and they don't want anyone paying attention. So it complicates this idea of institutional reform in powerful ways. And then again, we focus a lot when we think about institutional reforms on helping women who are victimized by men by increasing prosecution, by increasing oversight. But in this case, it's the women who are being prosecuted, right? It's the perpetrators who are also the victims. And so what does that mean about how we need to reform institutions? I'm really short on time, so I'm gonna kind of go quickly here. So why was there this regressive change and why was it so easy in El Salvador? Obviously there's a huge cultural component, right? If you already believe that motherhood is a natural thing for women, then this ideology of perverse motherhood, mothers who throw away their babies would be fairly easy to accept. But one thing that we've learned, especially since Santos joined the Attorney General's office is that there's actually some really structural issues as well. So for example, the Fiscales in El Salvador, the ones who prosecute in the homicide division have about 600 cases each. And then they have quotas that they have to fulfill, so they have to actually arrest two people a month and they have to bring four cases to trial every month. So if you have these 600 cases and you're trying to decide which one you're gonna be to bring to trial to meet your quota, you could either bring to trial the guy who has a lot of resources and lawyers to fight back against you, or you could bring to trial the gang members who are in El Salvador have no problem killing family members of lawyers who try to prosecute them, right? Or you could bring to trial someone like Maria Teresa who has no money, has no power, and basically you don't even need evidence to make sure that she gets prosecuted. So whereas most trials in El Salvador are languished for years before they're resolved, we've had these women's cases get resolved anywhere from like four to 16 months. So they're much faster. So these quotas, these over, and then over a number of cases, the high number of cases for the Fiscalists also leads to prosecution of the vulnerable. If Salvadorans have a complaint about the Fiscal, the only place they have to register that complaint is with the Fiscal themselves, and in general there's just no checks on judges who have poorly enacted the law. And I might skip this point because we're a little short on time, but in general the Fiscal, the prosecuting attorney has a lot more resources, a lot more opportunity to order tests and things than to defense, which makes for a bias or a uneven power. So to date, to summarize, in El Salvador we've had these progressive reforms. We've had an influx of women as Fiscalists and judges. We've had regular and thoughtful trainings with people who work in institutions on gender equity and the law. We've passed this new modern laws against gender violence. We've created women's agencies within the state and these women's cities throughout the nation, but the data on domestic violence say that the actual court, the actual prosecution of support of women suffering from violence hasn't changed much at all. In contrast, we also have this new law against abortion and fetal homicide in El Salvador, and the data there show that we've had this massive transformation in the judicial system, which allows the increased prosecution of women. So in the end, when we try to think about what do we do, right? If these current ways of reforming institutions aren't working, what can we do? And one thing that the activists and the lawyers in El Salvador consistently say is there needs to be some sort of external mechanism of valuation and control. And to give evidence on this, when we looked at these 17 cases and we wrote a document, kind of an amicus brief almost, that just cited gender bias, gender bias, gender bias, gender bias in all these ways, and we circulated that document to the legislative assembly and to the different courts in El Salvador. That was the first time we started seeing some of these cases being overturned. We've gotten about five women out of jail. There's still more than 30 that we need to work with. But there is this sense that judges will not uphold the law if they think they're doing what's right culturally and what their friends will think is right. But if you're shining a light on the fact that they're twisting and dementing the law in some way that we do have change. Minus two minutes. Okay. So we could think about elaborating protocols for gender specific cases. If a woman comes into the hospital, what could she, what kinds of things do you need to look for? Equalizing resources between the defense and the prosecution. Giving the fissalis a better way of sort of deciding which cases to operate. So the most marginalized are not the first to be prosecuted. And El Salvador is looking at a separate court for gender bias violence cases. So a lot of information, and I love your ideas about how to better present this in a paper. What is, all this information, what's the paper really about? So thank you.