Machismo, Church Complicate Issue : Tradition, Poverty Shape Mexico Abortion Debate

Weak from anesthesia, Teresa Juarez left the clandestine abortion clinic two hours after she had arrived. The fear that possessed her going into the illegal operation gave way to relief afterward.

“We couldn’t afford another child, and I wasn’t going to bring my baby into the world to suffer,” recalled Juarez, 27. “I was done with the problem.”

In fact, her problems were just beginning. On the way back to Mexico City from an industrial suburb, an unmarked car intercepted the white van carrying Juarez and four other women who had just undergone abortions. A man and a woman in civilian dress and armed with pistols expelled the driver of the van, then ordered the passengers to cover their heads, Juarez said.

“Assassins! Whores! Bitches!” Juarez said she heard them shout. The pair told a transit police officer who tried to stop the hijacking, “We’re from (police) intelligence.”

Juarez spent more than 14 hours incommunicado at a jail in Tlaxcoaque, on the outskirts of Mexico City, where she says she and the other women were slapped, pinched, kicked and forced to watch as a screaming, hooded man was repeatedly dunked in water.

“While you’re watching, you wonder when they are going to do this to you,” she said. “It was a nightmare that I couldn’t believe was happening.”

Arrests for abortion are not nearly as rare in Mexico as are public protests over the issue. Juarez, a member of the leftist Revolutionary Workers Party, said she has publicized the detentions because the women, released the next day with no charges filed, were mistreated.

The sensational case, also denounced by human rights activists, has been taken up by feminists and female legislators who launched a new drive last week to legalize abortion in Mexico.

The move comes at a time when legal abortion is under increasing attack in the United States. The U.S. Supreme Court, which includes a number of conservative appointees of the Ronald Reagan Administration, plans on April 26 to hear a Missouri case that challenges the landmark Roe vs. Wade decision that legalized abortion.

As complicated as the moral issue of abortion is in the United States, it grows even more complex in Mexico: Pro-choice arguments run up against a culture of machismo and the Roman Catholic Church; anti-abortionists encounter resistance from impoverished women.

Birth control was legalized in Mexico only in 1973. It is still common for employers to ask female job applicants to submit to a pregnancy test, and pregnant women frequently are fired.

The Mexican penal code prohibits abortion except in cases of rape and when the mother’s life is endangered. A few states have more liberal laws allowing for abortions of deformed fetuses or, in Yucatan state, because of economic hardship.

Virtually Impossible

But in practice, doctors and feminist groups say, it is virtually impossible to obtain a legal abortion even for pregnancies resulting from rape. The law does not specify who must authorize a legal abortion or who may perform one.

“It can take 11 months to get a legal abortion,” said Maria del Carmen Sanchez, legal representative of the Support Center for Raped Women.

Dr. Manuel Urbina Fuentes, director of Family Planning in the Health Ministry, was uncertain about how a woman would go about obtaining a legal abortion. He said the government has no figures for legal abortions performed in Mexico.

The penalty for performing or undergoing an illegal abortion is automatically a suspended sentence, but doctors also will lose their medical licenses.

Women’s groups attempted to change abortion laws 10 years ago but failed against resistance from anti-abortion groups and the powerful church. In 1983, the Mexican attorney general suggested liberalizing the law but quickly dropped the hot issue.

Pro-Choice Groups Optimistic

Mexico remains an overwhelmingly Catholic country, and the government of President Carlos Salinas de Gortari has made overtures to the church. But pro-choice groups are optimistic that the laws might be liberalized. They note that Catholic countries such as Italy have legalized abortion. They say more open discussion of family planning has changed the political climate. And they are buoyed by a newly fortified leftist opposition with many more seats in the National Congress than in 1979.

Anti-abortion groups say the possibility of legalizing abortion in Mexico is greater now than at any time since the abortion law was put on the books a half-century ago.

“The pressure has grown in the Chamber of Deputies with the increase in leftist parties,” said Jorge Serrano Limon, president of the Pro-Vida anti-abortion group. “We have launched a campaign . . . telling (the deputies) they will be responsible for the spilling of blood if it is legalized.”

Pro-choice groups also have begun a campaign to sway public opinion and they, too, are targeting federal deputies, particularly women from the ruling Institutional Revolutionary Party.

More than 280 women writers, artists, intellectuals and politicians signed an advertisement published in Mexico City newspapers last week calling for abortion reform. A few of the co-signers either work for the government or belong to the PRI, as the ruling party is popularly called.

‘Most Cowardly Crime’

The debate is as emotional in Mexico as it is in the United States, with Pro-Vida’s Serrano Limon calling abortion “the most cowardly crime that a human being can commit” and threatening to take up such U.S.-style tactics as sit-ins and blockades if it is legalized.

Pro-choice groups maintain that abortion should be treated as a health issue--to end an expensive and often-dangerous black market in abortion--rather than as a moral issue.

“A secular state should not impose a religious point of view on all of its citizens,” said Amalia Garcia, a Mexican Socialist Party deputy. “The state should guarantee the right of women to follow their own conscience, as it does with divorce.”

There is controversy over the numbers of illegal abortions performed each year and of deaths resulting from abortion complications.

The secretary of health, Dr. Jesus Kumate, says he is aware of 147 deaths from abortions last year and of 240,000 cases of women hospitalized after abortions or miscarriages.

Family planning director Urbina adds that the number of women practicing birth control has risen from 1.8 million in 1976 to 7 million today. The birth rate remains 2.9% to 3%.

“My impression is that the number of abortions has decreased, and that impression is based on statistics showing that each year fewer women go to hospitals because of complications from abortions,” Urbina said. “Family planning has helped.”

But the use of birth control is not widespread. Only married women may obtain free contraceptives from government clinics. Rural women often have no access to birth control. Many men still view offspring as a sign of their masculinity, or prohibit their wives from using birth control for fear the women will “put the horns to them” with other men.

Abortionists and women’s groups say the number of abortions is much higher. Garcia, who helped draft the 1979 proposal to reform abortion laws, estimates that 2 million illegal abortions take place here annually.

Dr. Alfredo Rustrian, a surgical gynecologist and family planning specialist, said he believes that about 1 million illegal abortions are performed each year and that 50,000 women die from them.

Rustrian acknowledges that he has performed illegal abortions for up to 12 years “out of conviction.” He is one of the few doctors in Mexico who offer suction curettage, the safest abortion procedure.

“They come to me from all classes, ages and situations--from the rich 16-year-old who got pregnant on a date with her boyfriend to the peasant woman with four children who doesn’t want any more,” he said.

During an hourlong interview at his Mexico City office, Rustrian received two calls from women seeking abortions. The first he turned away after hearing that she was already nine weeks pregnant. He refuses to carry out the procedure after eight weeks because of the increased risk to the mother.

The second call came from a psychiatrist whose wife was 10 days overdue for her menstrual period and believed that her IUD had failed. Rustrian made an appointment for that evening.

Abortion Underground

Women find out about abortion clinics by word of mouth, through a loose underground network that Sanchez of the rape center likens to prostitution: “It’s illegal, but everybody knows where to find a prostitute.”

The price normally ranges from about $130 to $435 for abortions in which, most often, the doctor or nurse uses an implement to scrape out the uterus--a dangerous procedure that has been largely replaced in the United States with suction curettage.

But in rural and poor urban areas, inexperienced midwives and abortionists offer a $30 procedure that involves inserting a plastic tube into the cervix to create an infection and induce an abortion.

Also, many women attempt abortions on their own by inserting potassium-soaked cotton into their bodies, or eating quinine tablets or the medicinal herb zoapatle or other brew to produce contractions.

“This shows you how desperate women get looking for a way out of the problem. They prefer risking their lives with these cures to having the child,” Rustrian said. “This type of patient usually doesn’t go to the hospital for a week, when the infection from the abortion is all over her body. Often they die.”

Considered Lucky

Juarez, the wife of a provincial schoolteacher, said she paid about $150 for her abortion--more than a month’s salary for the average teacher. She said she considered herself lucky to find an experienced doctor to perform the illegal procedure.

Already the mother of a 3-year-old, Juarez said that she does not regret her decision to abort but that she has suffered from her experience. “I wake up in the night, afraid they are coming to get me,” she said.