A Mexican woman who was sentenced to 16 years in jail after suffering a miscarriage in a department store bathroom has walked free after a court in the central state of Querétaro overturned her homicide conviction.

Prosecutors had accused Dafne McPherson, 29, of murdering her newborn, but an appeal court judge found that the scientific evidence used to convict her was flimsy.

The case highlights the criminalisation of women who suffer miscarriages in parts of Mexico with intensely conservative and Catholic cultures.

Dafne McPherson was convicted in July 2016 of murdering her baby who died in a miscarriage. Photograph: Supplied

Mexico City decriminalised abortion a decade ago, but it remains illegal in much of the country, and women who suffer complicated births or spontaneous abortions are often targeted for prosecution.

McPherson, broke down in tears after she was released from prison on Thursday.



“I’m very happy. I’m going to be able to see my baby,” she said, referring to her daughter Lía, who she had not seen for three years.

But she had bitter words for the prosecutors. “They didn’t investigate –they didn’t do a thing … That’s why there are people inside who shouldn’t be in prison.”

McPherson was working at the Liverpool department store in the central Mexican city of San Juan del Río when she felt a sharp pain in her abdomen, and shortly after went into labour in the store bathroom.

She has always insisted that she did not even know she was pregnant, but prosecutors accused her of inducing delivery and suffocating her baby in the toilet.

Security at the store refused a Red Cross ambulance access to the parking lot, instead calling a private ambulance.



Paramedics eventually found McPherson unconscious in the bathroom, having suffered a massive loss of blood.

McPherson’s plight captured national attention after prosecutors accused her of indifference toward a newborn, describing her actions as something “not even a dog would do”.

Maricruz Ocampo, an activist on women’s issues in Querétaro argued that McPherson had been punished for not living up to an idealised vision of womanhood. “It was treated as an abortion, but it was also treated as a deficiency of her as a mother,” she said. “They said that she had to react as a ‘super woman’ because ‘that’s what every mother does’.”

McPherson’s parents were forced to sell the family home to cover legal costs.