Mention the U.S.-Mexico border and you set off political hot buttons. Everyone knows the two countries share complex historical, economic, and cultural relationships. But one relationship is seldom acknowledged: the movement of women across the border in both directions to obtain abortions over the years.
Sarah was a 22-year-old law school student at the University of Texas when she became pregnant in 1964. Her future husband was planning to attend law school after she graduated and got a job. They agreed they didn't want to have a child before marriage and felt they both deserved the chance to finish school. Together, they went to Piedras Negras across the border from Eagle Pass, Texas, where she had an illegal, but thankfully safe, abortion.
Jane was a young housewife with three preschool children in a southern Arizona ranching community in pre-pill 1958. The thought of caring for four children on a budget that strained hard to feed three had stressed her relationship with her husband almost to the breaking point. As much as she loved her children, Jane cried for days and thought she would either go insane or kill herself if she had to have another child.
Three women friends who had made the journey previously accompanied Jane across the border to Nogales, Mexico, where abortions were illegal, as they were then in Arizona and every other state in the U.S, While the women had heard of doctors in Phoenix who would terminate pregnancies for $1,000 or more, Jane couldn't begin to afford that. So for the U. S. equivalent of $100, Jane had an abortion. She bled profusely and was treated for infection after she returned -- but she regained her emotional balance, and was able to hold the family together. She later volunteered for the local NARAL affiliate determined that American women should not suffer the humiliation, indignities, and sheer terror she experienced.
Jane is a composite of women who have told me their stories over the years.
Sarah is Sarah Weddington, a Methodist minister's daughter who at age 26 became the youngest woman to argue before the U.S. Supreme Court. Her winning case was the 1973 Roe v Wade decision that legalized abortion throughout the U.S and has since saved the lives, health, and dignity of millions of women. She later served in the Texas legislature and the Carter administration; she remains a leading advocate for women.
Since Roe, and until very recently, Mexican women of means have routinely traveled to the U.S. for safe, legal abortions, much as Sarah and Jane traveled to Mexico in a previous generation for illegal ones.
A seismic shift occurred last April when Mexico City decriminalized abortion during the first 12 weeks of pregnancy.
While they wait for what they predict will be a favorable ruling by the Federal Supreme Court, reproductive rights activists are consolidating their gains by training medical and social workers in counseling women respectfully about all their pregnancy options. According to Maria Luisa Sanchez Fuentes, executive director of GIRE, Grupo de Informacion en Reproduccion Eligida/Information Group on Reproductive Choice, they are also working to ensure that public hospitals meet the law's requirements to provide abortion services free of charge as part of routine healthcare, and that the law's provisions for universal access to birth control methods and sexuality education to prevent unintended pregnancy from occurring in the first place are fully in force.
Abortion remains illegal in most of Mexico, except for cases of rape, incest, and in some states certain other reasons. Activists like Sanchez Fuentes are working to change that, heartened by public support in Mexico City, where the slogan is "Women decide, society respects, and the state guarantees."
Abortion, legal or not, exists in all societies because women the world over want a few simple things: to make a decent life for the children they have -- in the U.S., over 60 percent are mothers with one or more children when they choose abortion --and the right to their own lives, liberty, and pursuit of happiness. And because unintended pregnancies inevitably occur for a variety of reasons.
The difference is that when abortion is clandestine, women die or suffer debilitating illness such as infection or infertility. And in a profound sense, the psychological stigma of going to the back alley instead of the front door of a medical facility is harder to bear than the risk of infection, for it signals complete disregard for women's moral capacity to think and make responsible decisions.
Will women's rights activists in Mexico learn the lessons from U.S. that "the price of freedom is eternal vigilance" as Thomas Jefferson famously cautioned, so that the organized backlash against reproductive self-determination for women does not bring political setbacks like those in the U.S.?
Will we in the U.S. learn the lessons from Mexico, and make sure women have not just legal affirmation of the human right to make their own childbearing decisions, but also access to preventive services that reduce the need for abortion and full access to abortion services regardless of ability to pay? Or will we reach a point that American women must resort once more to crossing the border to Mexico for essential health care and respect they can't get at home?
Next: Safe, Legal, (accessible) and Rare
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Killing of unborn child is not 'Health Care' and certainly not 'vital health care'. It is violence rationalized via newspeak.
Responsible women control their reproductive status without violence; this is what contraceptives are for. Conceiving a human being, then disposing of it when inconvenient is not freedom. It is violence, irresponsibility, selfishness, and calousnes.
Denying the humanity of unborn child does not make the unborn child less human. It only makes the deniers less human.
The self-righteous pro-abortion 'pro-choicers' are no different from the self-righteous pro-war 'patriots'. Both embrace violence and try to twist the language to rationalize it. Both deny the humanity of their victims: the 'left wingers' deny the humanity of the unborn child, the right-wingers deny the humanity of 'gooks', 'rag-heads', and whoever is their 'enemy-dejour'. Both are flip sides of the same old paradigm based on lies, manipulation of language, and refusal to face the truth. Both believe they can get away with their bulshit through clever PR, both think they are absolutely right, and both will viciously attack their opponents.
Now go ahead tigers, try to bite my head off and see if I care. I realize that truth hurts and makes those who try to bamboozle positively vicious.
I know that in Argentina (another heavily-catholic country), birth control and contraceptive services are available free by law. However, there are differences between the letter of the law and how it actually plays out in reality; some doctors refuse to comply and deny women the care they are entitled to. It will be interesting to see if GIRE's work to enforce compliance will prevent a similar situation in Mexico City.
Thanks so much for writing about this important issue!
Bring a few HIGH DOLLAR lawsuit against blabber mouth nurses to regain privacy of medical treatments. I was married to a O.R. Nurse and they forget too often and reveal too much about their patients and the operations to family and friends. I had to tell her many times this is private info your running your mouth about and I don't need or want to know it.
I know they need to talk about thier day at work but names, procedures, and complications are no ones business outside the Operating Room.
Having grown up in a large US city in 60s (New York which had 10 Million residents, I could never understand how people who oppose a woman's right to bare children or not could dare to call themselves so called "pro-life"
At that time thousands of young women died or were rendered unable to have children when they were ready to from back street abortions that were often paid for by their boyfriends' partents.
In New York, there was a telephone number people called to a supposed "doctor" in Ohio who told them who to contact.
A friend of mine, at age 13, had to stand on 6th avenue with a carnation pinned to her shirt.
A station wagon then pulled up and swooped her away, with 5 other girls already seated there.
They were driven to a shoddy walk up building in "Hell's Kichen" (ninth avenue) where -- for $500 -- they received their hack job abortions...allowed to make it home on the subway alone.
2 weeks later she nearly hemorhagged to death, and would have had she not revealed it to her mother who after taking her to the hospital became enraged at her for it.
In those days it was rather common to learn about dead young girls whose whose metal hanger abortions were not successful. Or to find dead fetuses in suitcases of basements.
Pro Life? It is absurd to be more for an unorn
being than for the mother who is already alive.
But who can be surprised. Many of these so called "pro-lifers" support a teen aged boys right to own a machine gun!
How are women supposed to protect our rights when a group of men are conspiring to nominate another man for president who'll nominate other men for judicial positions who're looking to take away women's rights? It seems most women are working too hard nowadays to make ends meet to fight the power.
I cross the border for all my essential health care now. (Luckily, I live close enough to the border to do so, and luckier still I have never needed an abortion.) But what about all those poor third world Americans in the mid west, who cannot make it to the first world clinics in Tijuana? (I'm not joking either, there are some extremely modern clinics in Tijuana with all the latest technology, for very accessible prices.)
Every woman around the world deserves full and open access to all forms of reproductive control. The government has no place in restricting such access. Government may insure safe facility care, but beyond that the decisions are private and should be left to a woman and her medical advisers.
Lary Waldman