Between high medical expenses and calls to consider other options, a young American woman was hindered from having an abortion in California. But with the help of a Mexican feminist collective, she was able to terminate her pregnancy.
“We are supposedly in a free country, in a state where you can smoke marijuana, but abortion is still somewhat taboo,” the 31-year-old told AFP shortly before the US Supreme Court ruled against her. of abortion.
The young woman, who took for granted the meaning of Friday’s ruling, considers that the ban will be accentuated, although the governors of California, Oregon and Washington announced a joint initiative to guarantee access to abortion.
The highest court overturned the judgment Roe v. Wade of 1973, which guaranteed that right, and now each state will decide whether to authorize the free termination of pregnancy in a country where half of the women live in territories hostile to abortion.
But even before sentencing, accessing a secure procedure in USA It was already “complicated if you don’t have money,” says the young woman of Mexican descent, an employee at a restaurant in San Diego and a single mother of three children.
“desperate”
A couple of months ago he went to a clinic belonging to a religious congregation and to another private one, but in both the intervention cost him almost 1,000 dollars, which he could not pay.
The nuns “did not want me to have an abortion, they told me that there were other options, that I could give him up for adoption. But I was determined, desperate, I could not keep another child,” she adds, assuring that she became pregnant because contraceptives failed.
From a friend she learned about the bloodiesan NGO from Tijuana (northwest) that is part of a cross border network dedicated to free assistance to women in the United States who cannot access an abortion.
I was surprised that from Mexico they helped me, I thought that here we were more liberal, that I was not going to fight. Everything was very fast there, they didn’t take a day to tell me “here is the solution” “, he says.
They sent her a combination of drugs that act by contracting the uterus, a method considered safe by the World Health Organization (WHO), mainly up to 12 weeks of gestation.
In addition, “they gave me follow-up (by instant messaging), any questions they answered very quickly. They were always supportive,” he adds.
Crystal Pérez Lira, member of bloodiesexplains that since 2019 they send these treatments to conservative states such as Oklahoma, Texas or Georgia, and anticipates greater requests after the ruling.
“It is very unfortunate, a huge setback, but we are going to have the capacity and the will” to support, the activist said.
Lists, after failure
The mexican feminists are also surprised by the response from USA to the cross-border network, launched on January 23 in the face of obstacles to accessing a safe abortion in that country.
“Until May we had accompanied 200 women who crossed the border and we have delivered 1,000 medicine combos for shipment. We did not expect so many,” says Verónica Cruz, founder of Las Libres, part of the network.
The organizations anticipated that the “accompaniment” applicants would be especially Latinas, but they say that they are also looking for Saxons and Afro-descendants who do not speak Spanish.
Most turn to us for financial reasons. There it costs about 600 dollars a combo or they have to wait weeks to get them from organizations. We deliver them for free,” Cruz details.
Immigration status is another factor that leads to seeking assistance in Mexico.
“Women from the Latin American context look for us who may not feel comfortable going to a clinic because they do not have documents. We do not invade their privacy, we do not question their legal status or their nationality,” says Pérez Lira.
In Mexico Citythe first jurisdiction in Latin America that decriminalized abortion up to 12 weeks in 2007 and that provides free care regardless of place of residence, the authorities declare themselves ready to support women from the United States.
“It is truly regressive, sad, outrageous that in a country where these rights had been recognized, they are going backwards. We will be open to support. We have the capacity to attend to around 25,000 legal interruptions per year and now we are at half,” Oliva told AFP. López Arellano, Secretary of Health of Mexico City.
The Mexican capital is already an option to serve foreigners, since of the 247,000 procedures carried out in fifteen years, 10% have been on migrants in transit to the United States, most of them Central Americans, the official details.
After the capital, eight of the 32 Mexican states have decriminalized abortion, while last September the Supreme Court invalidated local laws that criminalized it.
According to him Guttmacher Instituteafter three decades of continuously falling, the number of abortions in the united states it increased 8% from 2017 to 2020, going from 860,000 to 930,000 annually. The data, however, excludes self-managed outages.
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