News

By Matthew Cullinan Hoffman

Part II of a III part series:

Part I
Part III

MANAGUA, August 16, 2007 (LifeSiteNews.com) – The political crisis surrounding “Rosita” began when two pro-abortion feminists, Marta Maria Blandon and Lorna Norori, discovered the existence of the pregnant girl at a Costa Rican hospital through media reports.  Blandon was the Central American Director of the US-based organization Ipas, which is a major promoter of abortion worldwide.  Norori was a therapist, who ironically claims to specialize in child sexual abuse. The duo, in league with the feminist “Network of Women Against Violence” decided that “Rosita” would be useful to their campaign to preserve and promote access to “therapeutic abortion” in Latin America. 

“From the very beginning a strategy was developed by the members of the support group that was set up and led by the Red de Mujeres contra la Violencia (Network of Women Against Violence) and many other organizations with long experience in the issues”, admitted Blandon in a 2003 interview for the Women’s Health Journal.

“This coalition of the broader women’s movement felt that it was the right time to lobby for an enforceable law allowing therapeutic abortion and to demand that the State take responsibility for Rosita’s case. This decision coincided with a struggle to prevent the elimination of therapeutic abortion, a battle long underway in Nicaragua: the Penal Code is currently being reformulated, and ‘pro-life’ groups are urging that the right to therapeutic abortion be removed.”

  The first step in their plan was to convince the government authorities to turn the girl over to them.  By their own admission, Blandon and Norori concealed their identities as pro-abortion activists when approaching the Costa Rican authorities. 

“We never introduced ourselves as members of the women’s movement or as feminists. We used other identities that were not threatening to these people who in a way had taken control of this family’s life,” said Blandon in the 2003 interview. “So we came as members of a high-level commission. I also introduced myself as a representative of Nicaragua’s Comision Nacional de Lucha contra la Muerte Materna (National Commission Against Maternal Mortality), of which I am a member. Lorna came as a consultant and an expert in sexual abuse.”

  Dr. Rafael Cabrera Artola, president of the pro-life group ANPROVIDA and Dean of the Faculty of Medicine at the Institute of Medical Science in Nicaragua, states that the Costa Rican medical authorities regard themselves as having been completely deceived by Blandon and Norori. “Now they say they were deceived, lie after lie,” he told a press conference on August 13th.

  At the time of her discovery by Blandon and Norori, “Rosita” was under the careful watch of Costa Rican doctors, who were concerned that a nine year old girl with a pregnancy faced serious risks if moved.  Although the feminists claimed to be concerned about the girl’s health, they ignored the physicians’ concerns about transporting the girl over long distances, and absconded with the girl, according to Cabrera.

  Meanwhile, the Costa Rican authorities were still attempting to determine the true identity of the rapist, and needed the presence of “Rosita” to complete their investigation.  Although the girl and her family had accused a Costa Rican man, Alexis Barquero, of having perpetrated the rape, investigators suspected that the real perpetrator was her stepfather, Francisco Fletes Sanchez.  Barquero had denied the accusation against him and said he had never even seen the girl. 

  Costa Rican investigators planned to obtain DNA evidence from the fetus to resolve the issue, but Blandon and Norori were apparently unconcerned about the resolution of the case, or the health issues involved in transporting “Rosita”. “They took her out at dawn on the 11th (of January 2003), from Costa Rica, at the time when the police of that country were on the trail of the stepfather of the girl,” noted Cabrera during his press briefing. “I think that was to prevent the confirmation of the rapist of the girl, defending the crime, an illegal criminal association that committed a criminal cover-up.”

  In her interview with the Woman’s Health Journal, Blandon admitted that “the parents wanted” to leave the country, and that she and Norori knew they were helping them to evade the criminal investigation. “Our number one priority was to get them out of there [Costa Rica], which is what the parents wanted,” stated Blandon.

  Blandon also acknowledged that “we were not able to leave Costa Rica because the parents had to make an official declaration for the trial of the rapist. Even though Rosita’s attacker was already in jail, the judge maintained that there was insufficient proof against him. Rosita and other children already had testified that he had abused and raped her, but the court was not satisfied. Why? Xenophobia, prejudice against immigrants. There was even an attempt to accuse Rosita’s father of the abuse…Finally, we did have to sneak them out clandestinely under veiled threats by the Minister of the National Child Welfare Agency who said that we might not be allowed to leave and that Rosita’s custody might be taken away from her parents. But we made it to Nicaragua.”

  Blandon further admitted in the interview that the parents could have procured an abortion legally in Costa Rica under existing exceptions to its anti-abortion laws, and that the parents had to be convinced by the Network of the necessity of an abortion after they had arrived in Nicaragua, thus eliminating the abortion as a possible motive for the move.  Strangely, they gave no answers regarding the couple’s motive for wishing to leave the country during a criminal investigation that had considered Fletes a suspect.

  The machinations of Blandon are not the only incident in which her organization, Ipas, has been involved in apparently, deceptive practices to promote its pro-abortion agenda in Latin America.  In 2006 Ipas, whose Latin American division was still being led by Blandon, falsely claimed that a woman in El Salvador was in jail for a “therapeutic abortion”, when in fact the woman had strangled the child after its birth.  Ipas used the case to raise money until the story was exposed as a hoax by LifeSiteNews.com in conjunction with pro-life activists in the nation (see Part 1
Part III