The Mexico Solution: What happened in Texas last time you couldn't get a legal abortion

7/28/2019 The Mexico Solution: What happened in Texas last time you couldn't get a legal abortion

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T ^ b o r t i o n Stor ies

o n tke B o rd e r

Your periods late? The clerk at Ciudad Juarezs

Benavides Pharm acy offers a custom er syringes of fe-

male hormones. Inject this twice, she advises. Down

the street, at the market where El Pasoans and tourists

huy party piatas, herbalists hawk bags of leaves and

bark. Guaranteed to bring on your period if youre less

tha n three m onths overdue, one vendor says.In Mexico, with few exceptions, ab ortion is a

crime. S tate law governing the city of Juarez, for in -

stance, declares that a woman convicted o f having an

illegal abor tion can be imprisoned for as long as five

years, and her ab ortion ist for three.

Nevertheless, before the U.S. Supreme Court legalized abortion

in 1973, Am erican wom en flocked to Mexico to end the ir pregn an-

cies. Black market abortions were easy to get then; and though moststill offered today are medically risky, they remain available.

Texas already prohibits Medicaid funding of abortion and re -

stricts techniques used to abort viable fetuses older than 20 weeks.

After the Supreme Court ruled on the Webster case, Texas was con -

sidered one of 22 states likely to furthe r limit or even outlaw abor-

tion. Should this happen, the M exican border may once again be -

come an abortion underground option for many American women.

Elizabeth Canfield, a Planned Parenthood counselor inAlbuquerque, New Mexico, worked from 1968 to 1971 with Clergy

Counseling Service for Problem Pregnancies in Los Angeles. The

group referred American women to abortionists in Mexican border

cities, especially Juarez.


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Abor tion Stories on the Border / 75

Juarez had many abortionists, Canfield said. Most were physi-

cians; others were laypeople trained by doctors. They charged $160 to

$200 to do an early abortion, and millions of dollars were beingmade. Everybody had relationships with the cop on the beat. Enor-

mous payoffs were taking place they c ou ldn t conceive of the U .S.

referrers not wanting a kickback.

A woman who went to Mexico for an abortion e ntered a James

Bond world, Canfield says. You nee ded to carry your money inside

your bra. You cou ldnt ever say ab or tio n, just som eth ing like Liz

sent me .

Though some black market abortion providers were very hu-manitarian, Canfield says, they were all doing it for the money.

Even back-up services, like airlines, cleaned up whether inten -

tionally or not. She recalls, for instance, one U.S. travel agent who

didn t want to know anything about wha t we were doing wh en we

made reservations through her. One day she called me and said, You

wont believe this, but we received an award for selling the most

three-day weekends to Mexico . Her boss kep t asking how it was tha t

so many of he r clients w anted to go there. S he was mortified!Canfield remembers.

After abortion was legalized in the United States, the Mexican

black marke t dissolved. M exican wom en of means, however, can still

find doctors who will occasionally provide discreet early abortions,

says Dr. Francisco Urango Vallarta, former director of the A ut ono -

mous Univers itys medical school in Chih ua hu a City, about 225 miles

beyond the border.

Its illegal, of course, so no on e is going to routinely do the pro-

cedure and thus earn a reputation as an abortionist, Urango says.

But occasionally, a docto r will, say, fall behind on his car payments.

Then he may do one. The procedure of choice, Urango says, is the

dilatation and curettage (D&.C) procedure, scraping the pregnant pa -

tie nt s uterus under th e p retex t of checking for diseases. The D& C

automatically causes abortion.

Many Mexican doctors who favor abortion rights but are reluc-

tant to break the law refer their patients to U.S. clinics such asReproductive Services in El Paso. Reproductive Services does 2,500

abortions annually, and a quarter of the patien ts are from Mexico.

Most are middle- and upper-class women seeking medically safe abor -

tions.


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76 I WOMEN AND OTHER ALIENS

Those Mexican women with neither co nnections nor money to

cross the border must rely on che ap hom e or drugstore remedies. As

indigent America n women did in the U nited States before abortionwas legalized, many Mexicans trying to end their pregnancies drink

tea made of herbs such as thyme, rue, or cedar bark, sold at herb mar-

kets. O r they use synthetic chemicals. A t a M exican pharmacy one

doesnt need prescriptions to buy hormone injections and drugs to

make the uterus contract so as to expel the fetus. If such measures

arent successful, a Mexican woman may apply caustic chemicals or

pay midwives or nurses, nicknamed stork scarers, to stick catheters

through her cervix.These methods are often ineffective and dangerous. The

Mexican Social Security Institute reported almost 60,000 cases of

abortion-related complications in 1988. Of those, at least 100 result -

ed in massive infections or hemorrhaging that led to death. Indeed,

in Mexico, illegal abortion is considered the second most common

cause of ma terna l mortality (after childb irth). Even so, the c oun trys

federal H ealth Secretariat estimates th at at least 500,000 of the pro-

cedures are performed annually.In Ciu dad Juarez, Dr. Carlos C ano Vargas, Assistant C hief of

Obstetrics and Gynecology at the c itys Ge neral Hospital, believes

many o f the 350 miscarriages his depar tment sees annually are really

illegal abortions.

But it s hard to prove , he says, because everyone conceals it.

The pharmacy drugs leave no traces. Infection can happen after a

natural miscarriage too, so th a ts no proof either. You may see caustic

chemical lesions or a catheter, but th at s very rare. A wo man can beon her death bed and usually wont admit anything. In six years Ive

seen only two cases of obvious abortions. For every verifiable one in

Juarez, there are countless more covered up.

Delia is a pseudonym for a Juarez woman whose abortion would

have gone unnoticed last year had it not been botched. The 26-year-

old is the mother of three preschoolers; her husband is a twin plant

factory worker, earning about $40 per week. W he n their youngest

child was six mo nths old, Delia found herself pregna nt again. Sh e istaciturn but matter-of-fact while describing what happened next.

We c ou ldn t afford ano the r child, so I took h orm one shots from

the drugstore and rue tea from the herb market. Nothing worked.

Then a friend told me about a nurse abortionist. For $350,000 pesos


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Abortion Stories on the Border / 77

(at the time about $200) she put a catheter up me that she was going

to remove n ext day. But at nig ht I got such a hig h fever tha t my hus -

band insisted I go to a clinic. If only Id known how to take out thecatheter! Because when the doctor saw it in me he got really mad and

called the police. They came and interrogated me, but of course I

wouldnt tell them where the nurse was.

The police made the clinic detain me for three days. Later at

the station I was interrogated again for four hours. Finally, the detec-

tives left the room and I just walked out. I hid at my mother s house

for a few days but th e police never came back.

Oh yes, Delia said, its very com mon for women he re to getabortions. If you know the pharmacist you can get the injections, and

there are lots of abortionists. A lot of my friends have had abortions.

Most already have children.

Delias abor tion was reported in the local Mexic an press com -

plete with her name and address on the police blotter page, along

with stories about gang leaders, robbers and rapists. She was never in -

dicted, however.

It is hard to prosecute these cases, shrugs State Police ChiefInvestigator Saul O scar Osollo. De lias was one of only a bou t five

abortions reported to the Juarez police each year, he said.

Some Mexican women with botched abortions are luckier than

Delia they make it to El Paso, where health care providers like

Reproductive Services do mop-up duty. Once, says clinic director

Patti Pagels, We su ctioned a wom ans uterus and found rubber bands

in it. The patient was from Juarez. We told her we werent going to

report it, but she wo uldn t admit having don e any thin g.Another recent patient, a 17-year-old, came in already 16 or 17

weeks pregnant. The lab work indicated she was perfectly healthy;

but this is how fast the infection sets in next day when she re -

turned, a faucet of green, rancid pus was coming ou t of he r vagina.

We immediately gave her 2000 milligrams of tetracycline. An hour

later she was blue and shivering she could nt swallow and he r te m -

perature was 104.5. She ended up spending five days on antibiotics at

Th om aso n (El Pasos county ho spit al).She told us shed gone to somebody in Juarez whod stuck some-

thing up her. It scared me! I thou ght, W hat if she ha d n t come here?

How long would she have waited to tell her parents?

Death from septic abortion is horrible, Pagels says. My God,


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78 I WOMEN AND OTHER ALIENS

nobody should ever have to die like that .

Elizabeth Canfield, recalling her work two decades ago referring

Am erican women to Me xican abortionists, predicts that if abortionsare outlawed in Texas, wom en will travel to o the r states where they

remain legal. But if a change in the law results in ready availability of

abortion in Mex ican cities, A mericans along the border may go south

as they did in the past.

Canfield keeps in touch with a former Juarez abortionist. Hes

now a law enforcement officer, she said. He told me recently that if

things ever get tough again in this country, hell help us again.

1989

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The Mexico Solution: What happened in Texas last time you couldn't get a legal abortion