Sitting in the concrete courtyard of Ilopango women's prison in San Salvador, El Salvador, Teodora del Carmen Vasquez speaks slowly, with the tone of someone who has told her story many times.

It was more 10 years ago that she made a 9-11 call that led to her 30-year prison sentence.

"I told them I was pregnant, and that I was going to have my baby," she recalls as other prisoners mill around the courtyard doing their daily tasks.

"I asked them to help me … I kept dialing, but the ambulance never came."

Four hours later and still in extreme pain and bleeding, Carmen Vasquez says she went to the toilet of a school where she was working.

"When I was in the toilet, I hadn't even sat when I felt something come down, and I fainted," she tells Al Jazeera.

After regaining consciousness, Carmen Vasquez says she sat outside the toilet waiting for help, surrounded by her blood, unaware that she had already delivered her daughter and that the baby was stillborn.

Someone else who was in the school at the time had spotted the blood and flagged down a passing police patrol.

When the police arrived, they did not give her the medical care or help she so desperately needed.

Instead, they handcuffed her.

"They told me they were arresting me for the crime of homicide," she recalls.

Read Carmen's story about being jailed after delivering a stillborn child at Al Jazeera.