The Daily - The Mexican Model of Abortion Rights

Episode Date: May 17, 2022

When the Supreme Court decriminalized abortion with Roe v. Wade, it established the United States as a global leader on abortion rights, decades ahead of many other countries. Now, with Roe likely to be overturned, we look to Mexico, a country where the playbook for securing legalized abortion could be a model for activists in the United States. Guest: Natalie Kitroeff, a correspondent covering Mexico, Central America and the Caribbean for The New York Times.Want more from The Daily? For one big idea on the news each week from our team, subscribe to our newsletter. Background reading: Verónica Cruz spent years defying the law in Mexico, helping thousands of women get abortions. Now that Mexico has legalized abortion, activists are bringing their mission to a country moving in the opposite direction: the United States.For more information on today’s episode, visit nytimes.com/thedaily. Transcripts of each episode will be made available by the next workday. 

From The New York Times, I'm Michael Bavaro. This is The Daily. Today. When the Supreme Court decriminalized abortion with Roe v. Wade in 1973, it instantly established the United States as a global leader on abortion rights, decades ahead of many other countries. But in recent years, there's been a dramatic reversal. The country that for so long was a beacon to abortion rights activists worldwide has been restricting access, just as many other countries have finally begun to expand it.

as many other countries have finally begun to expand it. My colleague, Natalie Kittroweff, has been reporting on how, with Roe itself now likely to be overturned, Mexico could suddenly be a model to abortion activists in the US. It's Tuesday, May 17th. It's Tuesday, May 17th. So, Natalie, tell us about the reporting that you have been doing in Mexico in the lead-up to this leak of the Supreme Court draft opinion showing that the U.S. is headed toward

Roe versus Wade being overturned. Why Mexico in this moment? Yeah, so I've been especially interested in what was going on in Mexico because, of course, well in advance of the leak, the U.S. had been passing increasingly restrictive abortion laws all across the country. And in Mexico, you have this example just across the border of this place where for years abortion had been illegal in the vast majority of states in all but the rarest of cases. But many women were still getting abortions there.

So I wanted to understand how that worked. And so a few months ago, I traveled to one of the country's most conservative states, Guanajuato. Okay, I think we are outside of Las Libres. To meet a woman named Veronica Cruz. There she is. And who is Veronica Cruz. There she is. And who is Veronica Cruz? She runs an activist organization called Las Libres, which translates to the free ones.

She's 51 years old. She's maybe 5'2". And she's just a ball of wound up energy. Uh-huh. Everything about Veronica just feels like a woman of action. She talks really fast. Her limbs are in constant motion. And she's one of those people who just kind of seems

like they're doing three things at once all the time. And on the day we meet up, she has a super full schedule as usual. So we end up chatting in the car on the way to a meeting and that's when she tells me how she started doing this work. And what does she tell you?

Back in the mid-90s, when Veronica is in her 20s, she gets involved with the feminist movement in Mexico. And at the time, she's primarily focused on fighting violence against women and promoting women's health in rural areas. violence against women and promoting women's health in rural areas. But through that work, she starts to see, really, the impact of Mexico's conservative Catholic culture on areas of women's health that we don't even usually think of as controversial. What do you mean? Well, she's seeing women dying of high rates of breast and cervical cancer. And part of the reason, she says, is that their husbands wouldn't even let doctors look at these parts of their body.

So they're going undiagnosed and untreated. Wow. And so you can imagine in this context just how off-limits any discussion of abortion is and how unsafe the situation is in general as a result of that. Because you're saying it's just totally taboo. Exactly. Nobody's talking about that topic. But as she's spending more and more time with women in these rural areas, they start coming to her, asking for help in getting illegal abortions.

And so Veronica thinks, wait a minute, we as feminists need to start talking about this. This thing that these women keep bringing up, this needs to become a focus for us. this thing that these women keep bringing up, this needs to become a focus for us. And so as a starting point, she decides to survey dozens of her colleagues in the feminist movement, people she's working with, to try to understand how they're thinking about this issue. And what does she learn from this survey?

It's interesting. She finds that nearly all of the women in the movement report having had an abortion. But even these women, these feminists, report being very uncomfortable talking about the issue. issue. And interestingly, the women who had gotten abortions were actually the ones who were most uncomfortable talking about it. They reported feeling extremely guilty about their decision. And Veronica says she's truly shocked by these responses. And it makes her think, wait a minute, how are we as feminists going to get anywhere on this issue when we ourselves feel such deep shame around it? Mm-hmm. For Veronica, as she's building her approach to abortion in Mexico,

this really shapes her thinking around how to deal with this issue in this country. She, like so many women in so many countries at this time, is looking to the United States as an inspiration. She says what the U.S. has achieved through the courts, the protection of abortion as a guaranteed right, it's the gold standard she's working toward. But in Mexico, Veronica is seeing that she really has to fight another fight first. Before she can even get to legalization, there's this deeper, more fundamental fight that she's waging. It's a cultural battle. And it's about destigmatizing the issue. She sees it as winning over hearts and minds. Right.

And she puts that approach into action in the year 2000, which is when Mexico elects a conservative president. And that emboldens these local officials in Guanajuato, where she lives, to try to make their already strict abortion laws even stricter. They pass a bill banning the procedure even for women who have been victims of rape. And Veronica is determined to get rid of this bill, right? So she goes looking for women who have been victims of rape and persuades them to tell their stories publicly everywhere she can. She's leading these massive protests. They're taking over buildings. And she figures that once people hear these stories, they're going to be so horrified at the prospect of forcing these women to carry out their pregnancies that the law just can't go through. People will be so opposed to it that the government

is going to have to let it go. And it actually works. The government backtracks and vetoes the bill. So she actually helps block this law from ever going into place. So she actually helps block this law from ever going into place. But almost immediately, it becomes clear to Veronica just how powerful the cultural resistance in Guanajuato can actually be at a practical level. Because even though it's now legal to provide an abortion like this, Veronica is finding that the vast majority of doctors in the state are still refusing to actually carry them out. She starts approaching gynecologists and puts together a small group of doctors

who are willing to provide these abortions. And now the word is starting to get out about what she's doing, and women who aren't victims of rape are coming to Las Libres, her organization, asking for help getting abortions. So she and this group are increasingly becoming known in this country through a kind of word of mouth sharing of information and resources, it sounds like. Yes, but she's kind of stuck. Most doctors are still unwilling to provide abortions,

legal or illegal. And there is no hope, at this point of the Mexican courts going the way of the U.S. and having their own Roe versus Wade anytime soon. And then, in 2002, this gynecologist she works with comes back from a conference abroad. And Veronica is really excited about something this doctor's heard. Which is what? There's a medicine for abortions. It's called misoprostol. It's called misoprostol. So for years, women in Latin America had been secretly using this pill, misoprostol, to cause abortions.

It's actually an ulcer medication that often through word of mouth, women came to realize could also function as an abortion pill. And as time goes on, the medical community gets wind that it's being used in this way. And they look into it and they realize, actually, this is really safe. And so eventually, the World Health Organization recommends it, you know, formally, says it's okay to use this, it's safe to use this for abortions up to 12 weeks of pregnancy. it's okay to use this, it's safe to use this for abortions up to 12 weeks of pregnancy. And Veronica's hearing about it and realizing, wow, because this is an ulcer medicine, it's sold in Mexico, and you can get it without a prescription.

And she says at this point, when she learns this, her eyes lit up and she said, this means we don't need doctors to be on board with this. Women can give themselves abortions. Wow. And so to start, Veronica sets out to learn all about this medicine. She draws on this existing network of doctors she's been working with, doctors who were willing to provide legal abortions to victims of rape. And she starts bringing this other group of women, women who weren't victims of rape, to these doctors. And what she tells me is that a kind of don't ask, don't tell approach emerges where the doctors aren't asking whether the women were raped, and she's not really

saying it. And these doctors are still helping these women through abortions that happen with these pills. Huh, so that feels like a change. These doctors who had been largely unwilling to provide abortions to women who aren't victims of rape now seem to be kind of willing to look the other way. Yeah, I think that's right. And I think it really has to do with this shift from surgical abortions to pills. It's a lot different to perform a surgery on a woman than it is to supervise her as she takes a pill, right? There's something about that that has the potential to transform how you think about an abortion. And Veronica gets this. She sees that pills are probably the most important tool

that she will have to advance her strategy on this issue. And after she's observed hundreds of these procedures with the help of these doctors, who may or may not know that the women are not victims of rape, right? And she learns all the best practices for administering these pills, all the questions that women might have

as they're taking them. She takes it one step further. She cuts the doctor out of the picture altogether. She starts doing what she calls accompanying women as they induce their own abortions at home with these pills. And the idea is that once one woman has an abortion this way, she'll become someone who helps the next woman have an abortion, and she'll help the next woman, and so on. Until Veronica has formed a network, a kind of

underground network for abortion pills, and it grows and grows over the years. Veronica estimates that she's now helped around 20,000 women in Mexico have this kind of abortion with pills. Wow. 20,000. Most of them technically illegal, I assume. Yes, yes. I mean, really, there is no overstating the influence that she has had on the abortion landscape in this country. She becomes an absolutely key figure. And, you know, in that role, she starts getting invited to conferences around the world and talking with abortion rights activists from other countries, including the U.S. And she says it's at this point that she starts to question that U.S. model that has been so inspiring to her all these years.

Well, all this time, it seemed like the ideal, right? That because of Roe versus Wade, this constitutional protection that was established, you have these clinics. They're all across the country. And women can just go in and get abortions, she says. Abortions that they have the right to receive. I mean, this is the dream for her.

And when medical abortions start to become more common, the clinics start providing those too. They build those into their system. And now women can just walk into these clinics and get pills if they want to. But as Veronica is meeting and hearing from American activists, she starts to realize, wait, they're not really talking about a backup plan. This hearts and minds stuff, they're not really doing much of it. Because the U.S. has had this legal protection in place for so many years, this whole system has been built up around it. And it's all resting on this one Supreme Court decision.

This one Supreme Court decision that, as remote a possibility as it seems at the time, could be overturned. And she starts to think the American activists might be making a mistake. We'll be right back. So Natalie, Veronica is building up this network of women in Mexico. And as she's doing that, she's looking over at the U.S. and starting to question its model. So what happens next? Well, so last September,

the work Veronica has been doing for all these years, it pays off. Mexico's Supreme Court unanimously rules that criminalizing abortion, as so many states in the country have done, is unconstitutional, paving the way for abortion to be legalized across the country. And immediately, a lot of the credit is given to groups like Las Libres and other feminist organizations who've been fighting out in the streets demanding these rights for years. And obviously, Veronica is overjoyed.

But the timing is really kind of extraordinary because within days of that ruling, Texas enacts the most restrictive abortion law in the U.S., banning abortions after six weeks. And remember, this was seen as a clear indication that Roe might be in serious trouble. So the same week that Mexico gets its version of Roe, there's this huge blow to Roe back in the United States.

Exactly. And this fear that's been nagging at Veronica about how vulnerable the U.S. might be without any other system in place, it's coming true. And what it signals to her is that here in Mexico, regardless of this legal victory, she can't stop doing what she's been doing. And to show me what she means by that,

she offers to introduce me to someone. So the same day I meet with Veronica, I drive across the state to meet this young woman. And she agrees to go by her first name, Sofia. And tell me about Sofia. So Sofia is 23. When I spoke to her, she was just finishing up college online while working at a law firm. And she's fluent in English.

And so when I realized that, we switched over. If you wanted to. She's this very put-together person. She's dressed professionally. She just exudes confidence. Like, she knows exactly what she wants. And I knew always that having a baby being my age would be an obstacle for me for achieving like everything I have ever wanted.

So when she finds out that she's accidentally gotten pregnant, she knows what she wants to do. She lives at home with her parents, who are conservative, and so she doesn't feel like she can talk to them about it. But because of the work that activists like Veronica have done, she has a good sense of what her options are. I knew what I needed to look for on Google. I knew where I needed to go, like to buy the medicines and everything. She knows that one of the most common methods women pursue are these over-the-counter ulcer pills.

And so within hours of finding out that she's pregnant, Sofia goes with a friend to try this. And now, just to be clear, even after Mexico has decriminalized abortion, many women are still turning to this informal system of ulcer pills that Veronica has helped establish. Right. The Supreme Court in Mexico has decriminalized abortion, The Supreme Court in Mexico has decriminalized abortion, but Mexican states still need to change their own laws to make this a reality for women in practice, right? So the old system, the informal networks, that's all still really important. Women are still getting abortions at home with pills just as they were before the Supreme Court ruled. Mm-hmm. So Sofia goes to the pharmacy and gets this ulcer medication.

And the next morning, she wakes up, takes the first round of pills, and logs on for work from her bedroom. I was working, and I was waiting for the effects of the pill to work on me. But it doesn't work. She can tell by the way her body reacts. And Sofia has heard that sometimes, when the medication doesn't work, it can be a sign of an ectopic pregnancy, which can be dangerous.

So she decides to go see a doctor to get an ultrasound. And here, she's coming face-to-face with the kind of medical institution of Mexico. And what is her experience there? Well, it's not great. And what is her experience there? Well, it's not great. When I went to the little room, they told me, Señora, señora, pásale por aquí.

And I hate when someone calls me señora. The people there keep calling her señora. But I thought in my mind, well, I have no objection to that. Right now I can say that, no, señorita. Which in Mexico is a term that is usually reserved for married women or mothers. Because here in Mexico, when you have a pregnancy, you're not a señorita. You're a señora. And I was like, like in my mind, I was like, I am 23.

I'm not a señora. And she doesn't want to be a mother. She wants to get an abortion eventually, right? So she's not liking the way this makes her feel. But she gets the ultrasound. So anyway, so we're looking at these ultrasounds. And yeah, there's this little, it's this, right? Yeah, it's that little thing. There's a little, it's this, right? Yeah, it's that little thing. There's a little dot here.

And what she learns is that she doesn't have an ectopic pregnancy. The medication didn't work because she was too early in her pregnancy. She was only four or five weeks along. So, Sofia and her boyfriend begin to consider what her other options are. And the next day, her friend connects her to a doctor acquaintance in Mexico City. And she's talking to this doctor because she wants to know whether she needs to consider a surgical abortion in a place like Mexico City, which is one of the few places where abortion has been legal in Mexico, or whether she should pursue this other option

that she's heard about, which is a two-pill regimen that combines misoprostol, the ulcer medication, with another drug called mifepristone, a drug that's designed specifically to cause abortions. But of course, because of that, it's highly regulated in Mexico, this drug. And so Sofia wants to talk to the doctor to get some advice.

But instead of making her feel better, She didn't give me the vibe that I was waiting for. She says the conversation actually makes her feel worse. How so? She started telling me some things that made me lose all confidence in her. You know what, Sophie? This is not like cualquier cosa. She says the doctor's telling her,

you can't treat this just like a small thing, this medication. There are real risks. You need to plan it well. You need to take a decision about what you're going to do. risks. And on the one hand, of course, Sofia takes that seriously. It actually scares her. But it's also bugging her. Because from her own research, she understands that medical abortions are extremely low risk. I had read all the OMS protocol. The World Health Organization's protocol. And how they described it.

So that night I didn't sleep. You were just thinking about what you were going to do. Yes, I was in bed like this and I was just thinking, well, what should I do? Am I going to have an emirate like alone at the house at my house and then who's gonna tell my parents that that who's gonna explain them at the next day I like got into the shower I had an anxiety attack on the shower I was crying crying. I couldn't breathe. It was like a panic attack. Yeah. So I decided to stop talking to that friend over at Mexico City because she was...

This is really pretty telling. It might be hard to imagine ignoring the advice of a doctor who is telling her that taking matters into her own hands could be really dangerous. But Sofia is not convinced that the doctor actually knows as much as she could about this medication. And that instinct really speaks to the cultural landscape that Veronica has helped create in Mexico, that Sofia feels empowered enough to keep going, to pursue this on her own. And las encontré. Las libres. Las libres.

And pretty quickly, she comes across las libres. I sent a message to their Facebook account asking them for help. And they told me, yes, what do you need? I started telling them, well, I took misoprostol. I started telling them everything. On Facebook, just on Facebook Messenger? Yeah, just on Facebook Messenger. So the next day, she drives over to their office.

I rang the doorbell and two girls came out for me. And they give her the two-pill regimen, misoprostol, the ulcer medication, and mifepristone, the medication made specifically for abortion. And I went out of there, like, really relieved, satisfied and happy because I have never seen this kind of support. She goes back to her parents' house. And the next morning, Sofia once again locks herself in her room. This was yesterday? Yes. And takes the first pill. This was actually just the day before I met her.

Wow. actually just the day before I met her. Wow. And from the beginning, there is a woman from Las Libres that is in constant touch with her, following up, messaging her. We were talking through WhatsApp. I was telling her all my doubts. Making sure that everything's going okay, answering any questions she has. And after she's done her first dose, 24 hours later, one week from the day she found out that she was pregnant, she takes the second dose with her family just feet away in the other room. And at some time, my mom went to my room and we were talking and I was having the abortion.

Today? Today, yep. I was having the abortion while I was talking with my mom. And as the afternoon goes on, Sofia can tell it's working. She's feeling a lot of stomach pain. I stood up and then I just felt like you feel it being exposed. So I just felt it. Like it was completely on a second.

It was instantaneous. It was instantaneous. I felt it came out and then it didn't. It didn't hurt. And then it's done. Like I could breathe again. And when it's over, she takes a shower, goes downstairs to have lunch with her family,

and decides to run some errands. And that's it. And here you are. So how do you feel? I feel fine. I... Do you feel like any kind of, you know... Like remorse? I felt remorse for not feeling remorse. I didn't even thought about it.

I didn't even thought about it. And as I was saying goodbye to Sofia, What is your phone number to send it to you? And it's easier because you can send it to people through WhatsApp. 462? She was giving Veronica her contact information so she could join Las Libres' network. I know that I don't want anyone to be in this position. I want them to get to know that there is someone

that cares for these kinds of situations and that gives you all the information that you have a right to know. And this, what happened here, this is the backup plan that Veronica thinks the U.S. should have been building all along. And that was before the leak. All eyes on the nation's highest court after a leaked draft opinion

showed a majority of Supreme Court justices could be ready to overturn Roe v. Wade. Closer to losing a fundamental constitutional right. And then the question is how far is it gonna go in changing constitutional law to make that happen. 26 states are poised to outlaw abortion or weaken access if Roe v. Wade is overturned. Something that would end about half a century of abortion rights in the U.S. So a few days after the leak of the draft Supreme Court opinion overturning Roe v. Wade, I called Veronica back. Hola, hola, hola. ¿Me escuchas? Ya te escucho.

And what was her reaction to this news? Me sorprendió confirmar lo que imaginaba. And what was her reaction to this news? She says she's both shocked and not shocked. She saw this coming, right? But she says it's one thing to anticipate it, but to actually see it happening, the collapse of this bedrock upon which so much of the abortion rights fight has been built, it takes her breath away. And it feels like the big question for Veronica, now that it's actually

happening, is does she think it's too late? She wanted the U.S. to be building this backup plan, like the model she created in Mexico for letting women give themselves abortions to get around courts and laws that are on their side, that hasn't happened. Now that the U.S. is on the verge of striking down Roe and moving, in a lot of ways, closer to what Mexico was like when she helped found Las Libres, does she think that there's still the opportunity and now really the necessity for activists in the U.S. to do this? Yeah, so I asked her pretty much this exact question.

And you know, it's just in her nature. It's really sort of her job to be optimistic about this fight. So she says yes, she definitely does think the U.S. can do this, and that they have a real advantage that Mexico didn't, which is that the U.S. has the roadmap that she and other feminists in Mexico and across Latin America have already laid out. The U.S. doesn't have to start from scratch. And in fact, she's already starting to work with feminist organizations in Texas and across the United States

to try to bring these networks to the U.S., to try to get pills in the hands of women and accompany them through their abortions, just the way she did in Guanajuato. But she also acknowledges that there are real challenges here. She thinks the movement in the U.S. is divided around their ideas of what the next steps really should be. From her conversations with American activists, she says they seem to be split in two.

There are activists, activists she says she's hearing from, who are saying this is absolutely what we need to do. Mexico got it right. We need to get radicalized and the future has to be built around these pills and getting them to women in states where abortion is illegal. But then there are the activists who are resistant to that, who don't want the solution to be illegal, who want to keep fighting in the courts, in the state houses, in Washington, to secure once again a woman's legal right to choose. And I think this comes down to something really important. All along, Verónica has been fighting this cultural battle, right? But it's a cultural

battle specific to Mexico. It was built inside this largely socially conservative Catholic country. It was tailored for Mexico to deal with the stigma and the system that exists in Mexico. And it was also built in a country that didn't have any other options at the time. For the vast majority of women to get an abortion, they had to break the law. And the notion of breaking the law, that notion, which is baked into Veronica's model in Mexico, the notion of doing something outside the walls of your doctor's office, the walls of your doctor's office. It's just not what Americans are used to. It's completely unfamiliar for a lot of people. And to suddenly ask people to break the law in many cases, to give each other pills and get abortions at home, even if that's illegal, that requires some serious risk-taking that Americans haven't

necessarily had to do until now. And so that raises real questions about whether this cultural fight that Veronica has been waging in Mexico, whether it's going to translate to the U.S. Right. I mean, what happens when you take away a right that has been guaranteed for almost 50 years? Does that create the conditions in America where suddenly people are ready to take risks like Veronica and so many other Mexican women have? We just really don't know yet. I mean, for all her energy and optimism, I think Veronica herself has real questions about whether American feminists and American women are willing to take that leap and fight that fight.

Take that leap and fight that fight. Natalie, thank you very much. We appreciate it. Thanks, Michael. We'll be right back. Here's what else you need to know today. On Monday, police in Buffalo, New York, said that the racist gunman who killed 10 people at a grocery store over the weekend had planned an even deadlier massacre. The suspect, they said, wanted to strike multiple stores, potentially including a nearby Walmart, before he was stopped by police.

Meanwhile, fallout from the shooting reached Washington, where Congresswoman Liz Cheney accused fellow Republicans of promoting the hateful ideas embraced by the gunmen. In a tweet, Cheney wrote, quote, The House GOP leadership has enabled white nationalism, white supremacy, and anti-Semitism, white supremacy, and anti-Semitism, adding, quote, history has taught us that what begins with words ends in far worse. Finally, But we're not just hurting. We're angry. We're mad. This shouldn't have happened.

Relatives of the victims began to speak out about their pain, including Garnell Whitfield, whose 86-year-old mother, Ruth Whitfield, was killed during the rampage. And you expect us to keep doing this over and over and over again? Over and over. Over again. Forgive and forget. While the people we elect and trust in offices around this country do their best not to protect us

not to consider us equal not to love us back what are we supposed to do with all of this anger with all of this pain I can tell you Today's episode was produced by Claire Tennisgetter and put all of this pain. Today's episode was produced by Claire Tennesketter,

Rob Zipko, and Asta Chaturvedi with help from Chelsea Daniel and Caitlin Roberts. It was edited by Lisa Tobin, contains original music by Mary Lozano, Alisha Ba'itu, Dan Powell, and Rowan Nemisto, and was engineered by Chris Wood. Our theme music is by Jim Brunberg and Ben Landsberg of Wonderly. That's it for The Daily. I'm Michael Bilboro. See you tomorrow.