Jazmina Bojorge, a 19-year-old pregnant mother and wife, died in a Managua hospital earlier this month. She was five months pregnant, and sought emergency care when she began having early contractions.

Doctors, fearful of intervening because of a new Nicaraguan law that bans all abortions, even those that would save the lives of mothers, apparently allowed nature to take its course. The baby's placenta ripped away from Bojorge's uterus, causing her to bleed to death and the baby to die.

El Nuevo Diario, which has reported extensively on the new abortion law, reported the death. (If you can't navigate Spanish, you can read more at Salon.)

Nicaraguan doctors who opposed the new abortion law, predicted deaths like Mrs. Bojorge's. They say the law puts them "up against a wall." Without the ability to perform abortions in dire straits, as in the case of Mrs. Bojorge, patients would die and legal action would be taken against them. By the same token, performing an abortion in defiance of the law would strip doctors of their right to practice medicine and require them to serve a six-year prison term.

The same article reported that some doctors are or have considered dropping high-risk patients in order to avoid getting mired in legal wrangles. Sadly, those high-risk patients are those who need treatment and care the most.

The Church (actually churches, as there is a substantial evangelical minority in Nicaragua) has supported the no-abortions-under-any-circumstances law due to the estimated 30,000 terminations performed each year in Nicaragua. For decades, a therapeutic abortion could be performed if three doctors agreed it was necessary.

But Church officials, including Bismarck Conde, vicario of the Diocese of Managua, said that the law was being abused or women were having clandestine abortions. Conde and other Church leaders also said that abortion and euthanasia were tearing families apart.

The middle way might have been to more closely scrutinize the current abortion process, to close loopholes, and to be willing to live with some abortions in order to save women like Mrs. Bojorge and the hundreds each year who seek help for ectopic pregnancies.

But the Nicaraguan government, urged on by the Church, did not do that. Perhaps it was a question of numbers: Thousands of babies saved from abortion with only hundreds of women dead or injured from dangerous pregnancies. Perhaps that's the moral choice that should be made.

But it's a sad situation for Mrs. Bojorge and her family.