María Lobo and Roi Guitián’s documentary Indebted to All Women takes a hard and unflinching look at the criminalization of abortion in El Salvador and the consequences imposed against impoverished women in El Salvador.
Indebted to All Women (En Deuda con Todas) took home the Leslie J. Sacks Best Documentary Feature prize at the Women’s Voices Now film festival last week. But the activism that went into making the documentary, which you can watch in full with subtitles on YouTube, is nowhere near its end.
El Salvador’s abortion ban was strengthened in 1998 when a new abortion law went into effect that removed all exceptions, including cases in which the mother was raped or her life was endangered by the pregnancy.
In Indebted to All Women, which was shot in 2019, co-directors Lobo and Guitián were able to film inside a women’s prison in El Salvador, where they met women who were convicted of murder and given 15 to 30-year prison sentences simply for suffering miscarriages and stillbirths.
“This is a film that talks about the consequences and the full penalization of abortion in El Salvador,” Lobo, who lives in Spain, told MovieMaker.
But it’s also a story about human rights.
“The right to health and the right to life are human rights — those should be [unaffected by] any religion, any political interest, any economic situation. Human rights are universal,” she added. “This is a story about how much responsibility we in our rich countries have, because we have the power to create awareness, and we have the power to push governments to… make a change.”
Indebted to All Women also points out how El Salvador’s abortion ban disproportionately targets women and girls from lower economic classes who don’t have the means to travel to another country where abortion is legal.
“This is an issue of poor women, as the truth is, [it’s] not a problem for the women who have money or who are in a better social condition… you go to prison, you go to jail, and you see no rich women,” Lobo said. “Poor women, they don’t have that opportunity. So, for me, this is one of the consequences of inequality. Human rights, in my opinion, cannot be a matter of economic power acquisition. It cannot be it cannot depend on how much money you have.”
Indebted to All Women was commissioned by the social advocacy NGO Lobo works for, called AGARESO (The Galician Association of Communication for Social Change). Though their work to help the women of El Salvador continues, Lobo is not optimistic that the country’s government will change the law without pressure from outside countries.
“I don’t think that something is going to change in the next few years unless the international community really make hard pressure on it,” she said.
Indebted to All Women is now streaming on YouTube. You can learn more at the film’s website here.
Main Image: Teodora Vasquez, an El Salvadorian woman interviewed in Indebted to All Women
Share:
