Hard to read without grinding one’s teeth in rage: women in San Salvador spent years in prison for having miscarriages.

The case of Guadalupe Vásquez, who was imprisoned for more than seven years after losing the baby she conceived when she was raped at the age of 17, is to be examined by a panel of experts in the first People’s Tribunal to focus on El Salvador’s draconian anti-abortion law.

Vásquez, who was sentenced to 30 years for murder in 2008, was pardoned and freed last year after the supreme court ruled her conviction was unsafe. Her case is one of three that will come under renewed scrutiny this weekend following a dogged campaign by reproductive rights campaigners and relatives of women unfairly convicted under anti-abortion legislation.

Raped. At age 17. She was sentenced to 30 years in prison.

I can never get used to how much women are hated.

The campaigners aim to maintain the women’s plight in the public’s consciousness and put pressure on the authorities to decriminalise abortion, ending the imprisonments that have blighted the lives of Vásquez and many other Salvadoran mothers.

“I lost my youth in prison for a crime I didn’t commit,” says Vásquez, a devout Catholic who had been looking forward to motherhood, despite her ordeal at the hands of an older man who threatened to hurt her if she reported the crime.

“I wanted my baby, I don’t know why she died or what happened to her; her body was never returned to my family.”

El Salvador banned abortion in all circumstances in 1998. It is one of six states (including the Holy See) where there are no exceptions – even if a woman is raped, her health or life is at risk, or if the foetus is seriously deformed. Convictions related to abortion are shockingly commonplace in the country.

According to research by the Salvadoran Citizens’ Group for the Decriminalisation of Abortion, more than 250 women were reported to the police between 2000 and 2014, of whom 147 were prosecuted and 49 convicted – 26 for murder and 23 for abortion. The vast majority were like Vásquez: young, poor single women who lost their baby after an obstetric complication.

The population of El Salvador was 6.34 million in 2013.

I can’t bear to quote any more, it’s too infuriating. Read on.