by APRIL HOWARD
While social conservatives push to further criminalize abortion rights in the U.S., women in Latin America are fighting on both sides of the law to save lives. In Latin American countries where abortion is illegal or inaccessible, thousands of women die each year from forced life-threatening pregnancies, unsafe abortions and suicide due to pregnancy.
As María Galindo, of the Mujeres Creando anarchist/feminist movement in Bolivia, explains, “Abortion … is simply a question of life for thousands of women, precisely for the most poor, because in Bolivia, like all over the world, she who has money resolves [an unwanted pregnancy] in comfortable private clinics. [Access to safe] abortion is a question of democracy; women can’t be protected wards who are stripped of a basic right, such as sovereignty over one’s own body.”
When Paula looks back on her decision to abort, she says “I decided to have an abortion simply because I didn’t want to be a mother, I didn’t feel like it was part of me, I wasn’t excited… I didn’t want it … I was not expecting it or hoping for it…” Paula was able to have a safe, chemical abortion using the drug misoprostol under the care of a doctor, which is illegal in Bolivia where she lives. Her story, though, is a happy exception to a much more dire rule; every day in Bolivia lucrative illegal clinics name exorbitant and unstable fees for unsafe services. Bolivian pro-abortion activist Julieta Ojeda has heard cases of “doctors” who demand sexual favors from their clients, or botch abortions and abandon their clients to die. Other Bolivian women give testimony of practitioners at illegal clinics who have told them that they were pregnant when they weren’t, just to try to steal their money for an unneeded procedure.
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