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 Hernandez, 21, was exonerated earlier this week in a closely watched
retrial after an earlier judgment found her guilty of killing her
stillborn son and sentenced her to 30 years in prison.
Her case attracted international attention and came nearly three
months after Nayib Bukele took office in June, prompting questions
on whether he would call for a softer approach to abortion in a
country that bans any termination of a pregnancy.
During the campaign, Bukele said he favored legal abortion in cases
where the life of the mother is at risk, a position that represented
a significant shift for abortion politics in the overwhelmingly
Roman Catholic and evangelical country.
However, lawmakers have yet to take up a proposal submitted to
Congress in 2016 that would legalize abortion in cases of high-risk
pregnancies or rape.
When asked at a press conference about what she hoped Bukele would
do, Hernandez said the president should "really see what these cases
are like for women, how we're discriminated against."
"I feel that he would think about decriminalizing abortion," she
said.
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Hernandez said she was raped by a gang member and unaware of her
pregnancy until just before delivering a stillborn son in April
2016. She served three years of her three-decade sentence before the
retrial began in mid-July.
Smiling, Hernandez said she now planned to study English and
computer science, and support other women jailed because of similar
circumstances.
"I now feel my freedom. I feel like I've come back to life," she
said. "May God keep helping my comrades that are also (in jail), so
that they can receive justice and get out of there."
Nearly 150 Salvadoran women have been sentenced to up to four
decades in prison in abortion-related cases between 2000 and 2014,
according to the Citizen Group for the Decriminalization of
Abortion, a local rights group.
The group said it would seek fresh reviews of at least 16 similar
cases.
(Reporting by Nelson Renteria, Writing by David Alire Garcia and
Daina Beth Solomon; Editing by Lisa Shumaker)
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