El Salvador’s absolute ban on abortion – long considered one of the world’s most ruthless – is facing its greatest challenge in years. Buoyed by shifting public attitudes, reproductive rights activists are making headway on a bill to loosen the law for victims of rape and human trafficking, women carrying nonviable pregnancies, and women who risk death or illness.

But support for keeping the ban is formidable – and may have an outside source of help: a US-based anti-abortion group that has quietly funneled funds to El Salvador’s main advocates for the ban.

The source of those funds is Human Life International, a not-for-profit group based in the rural town of Front Royal, Virginia. According to documents seen by the Guardian, Human Life International has for years directed a steady flow of dollars to Sí a la Vida, the Salvadoran organization principally responsible for the country’s abortion ban.

The funding began in 2000, just as Sí a la Vida had declared victory against legal abortion. Three years earlier, the Salvadoran legislative assembly had banned abortion without exception. In 1999, the assembly added the ban to the country’s constitution.

The impact, human rights groups say, has been devastating.

Thousands of women and girls have been forced to continue pregnancies that are the result of rape. Last month, a 19-year-old who became pregnant after she was raped was sentenced to 30 years in jail after suffering a stillbirth.

The laws have also led directly to the prosecution, imprisonment, and even deaths of scores of women. Under the law, a woman who obtains an abortion or a doctor who performs one – whatever the reason – can be sentenced to several years in prison.

And over the years, Sí a la Vida has remained the abortion ban’s loudest supporter.

Human Life International, the US group, describes its own mission as training and supporting local anti-abortion activists and counselors in foreign countries.

Documents seen by the Guardian show that Human Life International gave $47,360 to Fundación Sí a la Vida from 2000 to 2007.

From 2008 to 2014, the group gave another $615,432 to what it called Central American causes, which may have included Sí a la Vida. In many of its public materials, Human Life International refers to the Salvadoran group as its El Salvador branch.

The documents – forms that Human Life International must file with the IRS as a not-for-profit organization – only date as far back as 2000, meaning the US group may have funded Sí a la Vida at the start of its campaign to ban abortion.

News coverage from that time indicates that Human Life International worked with Sí a la Vida in the 1990s to make El Salvador’s abortion ban a reality. In one example, a 2001 article titled “How to export pro-life activism”, Father Matthew Habiger, then president of Human Life International, said his group was “at the helm” when Sí a la Vida made its push for a constitutional amendment.

Groups opposing the abortion ban reacted with dismay that a US organization was lending its support.

“The abortion ban isn’t about protecting lives, it’s a law based in misogyny in which women’s lives don’t matter, and which encourages sexual and structural violence against women to be accepted,” said Sara Garcia, a campaigner with the Citizen’s Group for Decriminalization of Abortion. “Any group which supports the ban and is against the reform is promoting inequality, imprisonment and hate towards women.”

Officials at Human Life International declined to be interviewed for this article and responded to questions with a copy of the group’s mission statement.



Sí a la Vida did not respond to a request for comment.

Regardless of when its funding began, Human Life International has always been publicly supportive of El Salvador’s abortion laws.

Several years after the passage of the constitutional amendment, the leader of Human Life International at the time, the Rev Thomas Euteneuer, praised El Salvador’s laws as the inevitable reaction of grassroots forces to abortion rights laws passed by the “elite”.

“El Salvador is an inspiration,” Euteneuer told a New York Times reporter.

Sí a la Vida counsels women with unplanned pregnancies, visits schools, and takes out ads – targeted at women considering an illegal procedure – which read: “With an abortion, you die inside”.

Human Life International’s links to Sí a la Vida would seem at odds with the position – adopted in public by virtually every anti-abortion group in the United States – that the punishment for an abortion should never fall on the woman.

“Pro-abortion leaders should be imprisoned,” Brian Clowes, the director of education and research at Human Life International, wrote in 2013, “not the desperate women being pushed into abortion.”

The toll of El Salvador’s ban on abortion has fallen heavily on women who are young and poor, including some who had miscarriages or stillbirths and were punished with prison time.

There have been cases of doctors refusing to perform chemotherapy for pregnant women with cancer or refusing to treat ectopic pregnancies until the woman’s fallopian tubes burst.

In 2013, the Salvadoran supreme court provoked international condemnation after prohibiting a young woman from having an abortion to save her life. The woman, known as Beatriz, had lupus and was carrying a fetus with a fatal brain defect. Beatriz was permitted to have an emergency C-section after she became gravely ill. Her baby lived only a few hours.

The issue of abortion has deeply polarized Salvadorans, but public opinion is shifting towards easing the ban. A recent national survey found three-quarters of people support access to abortion when the pregnant girl or woman’s health or life is at risk.