The young woman with the cascading curls walked into a dumpy house with no sign out front on the day she decided to get an abortion.
Inside, she says, she paid $200 for eight syringes filled with a milky liquid and a set of instructions. She spent the night in a Mexico City hotel room, giving herself injections that made her bleed and cry out in agony.
The next day, weak and depressed, the woman was persuaded by her sister to see a doctor, who determined that she had undergone an incomplete abortion, the woman said during an interview on condition of anonymity. He conducted an emergency procedure to complete the abortion and stave off infection.
“What have I done?” she recalled thinking. “I risked my life.”
Whether anti-choice leaders like it or not, women will continue to risk their lives to terminate pregnancies. Criminalizing abortion does not make it go away — it doesn’t even significantly lesson the abortion rate. What does decrease the abortion rate? Accessible and affordable health care, including contraception, and a culture which views sex as a healthy and natural part of life — and one that you should take responsibility for.
But tried-and -true ways of lowering the abortion rate aren’t particularly interesting to “pro-life” politicians and leaders. Instead, they’d like to maintain the status quo in places like Mexico, where a million abortions take place every year, killing some 3,000 women and landing another 10,000 in the hospital. Abortion is the fifth leading cause of death for women in Mexico. That is not “pro-life.”