When Teodora del Carmen Vásquez walked out of the Ilopango women’s prison a few weeks ago, she embraced her parents, her teenage son – and a movement to change an anti-abortion law that stole more than a decade of her life.

In El Salvador, where a total ban on abortion leads to an immediate suspicion of women whose pregnancies do not end with a healthy baby, Vásquez was marked as a criminal after she began bleeding and suffered a stillbirth. Sentenced to 30 years for aggravated homicide, she was released only after the supreme court ruled that there was not enough evidence to show she had killed her baby.