Latinx Storytelling Tour features the topic of abortion restrictions
Paula Ávila-Guillén and Alejandra Gomez are interviewed at the Latinx Storytelling Tour on Sept. 26, 2024, at Monorchid in Phoenix, Arizona.
Cristina Quintanilla spent two years in prison as a teenager, a punishment after she delivered a stillborn child when she was seven months pregnant, she recounted Thursday during a storytelling event in Phoenix.
Quintanilla at the time was living in El Salvador, where women are routinely arrested and locked up for having miscarriages or delivering stillborn babies. The baby would have been Quintanilla’s second child, a child that she wanted.
Quintanilla was one of three Latin American women who recounted painful and sometimes horrific stories about reproductive restrictions as part of the Latinx Storytelling Tour, which had its first stop in Phoenix and has events planned this week in three more Arizona locations — Somerton, Nogales and Tucson — before heading to Florida.
“I went from the hospital directly to jail,” Quintanilla said in Spanish through a translator, recalling the 2004 stillbirth. “The press said I was a woman who had killed my baby.”
The purpose of the event, held just weeks before the Nov. 5 election, was to highlight the abortion stories of Latin American women from countries with severe abortion restrictions and to underscore the importance of fighting back against oppressive reproductive laws, organizers said.
Event organizers included Arizona abortion ballot campaign
Event organizers included the international Women’s Equality Center, as well as Arizona for Abortion Access, the ballot measure campaign for Proposition 139, which would to enshrine the right to an abortion in the Arizona Constitution.
A spokesperson with the anti-Proposition 139 campaign, called “It Goes Too Far,” said stories told by women from countries with extreme abortion bans sound tragic, but that such scenarios aren’t indicative of what’s happening in Arizona.
“Tragic stories from other states and other countries wouldn’t happen here,” It Goes Too Far spokesperson Cindy Dahlgren said, when told about the event by The Arizona Republic. “Women in Arizona are getting abortions and not being turned away. Women are getting treatment for miscarriages and ectopic pregnancies.”
Opponents of Proposition 139 say a constitutional amendment would allow unregulated abortion in the state, and that would in turn pose a safety risk to women and girls who seek abortions. They say the current law is sufficient, and not a ban on abortion as proponents have said.
Abortion is legal in Arizona up to 15 weeks gestation, with no exceptions for rape or incest, though there is an exception for a medical emergency. The law defines a medical emergency as a condition that, according to a physician’s “good faith clinical judgement,” complicates a woman’s health making the abortion necessary to “avert her death or for which a delay will create serious risk of substantial and irreversible impairment of a major bodily function.”
Proposition 139, if passed, prohibits restrictions on abortion until fetal viability: around 23 weeks or 24 weeks of pregnancy and when a treating health care provider determines there is a significant likelihood a fetus would survive outside the womb. After viability, the government could not restrict abortions that are necessary to protect the life or physical or mental health of the mother.
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The fight against abortion restrictions in Latin America is a movement often known as the Green Wave, because green signifies health, hope and life. While El Salvador still has a total abortion ban, there have been more recent victories in Mexico, Argentina and Colombia where abortion restrictions have loosened.
“I have seen firsthand what it is to live under restrictive abortion laws. Seeing it happening in the United States with a high population of Latinos, it feels close to home,” said Paula Avila-Guillen, a human-rights activist who is executive director of the Women’s Equality Center.
Storytelling events featuring Latin American women like Quintillana, will ideally send a message that “we cannot let these restrictions be the status quo,” Avila-Guillen said.
“If we let too much time pass, people will get comfortable,” she said. “This is a time to fight back.”
The Center for Reproductive Rights, a global human rights organization, says there has been overwhelming trend towards the liberalization of abortion laws, with 60 countries relaxing their laws over the last 30 years. Just four countries have rolled back the legality of abortion during the past three decades, the organization says: Nicaragua, Poland, El Salvador and the United States.
The abortion ban in El Salvador has no exceptions − similar to a ban in the Dominican Republic, where Rosa Hernández’s 16-year-old daughter Rosaura “Esperancita” Almonte Hernández was living when she became pregnant.
Rosaura learned she had leukemia in July 2012 when she was seven months pregnant and for that reason, her mother says she did not get the immediate treatment she needed, because doctors had to weigh whether the treatment would harm her baby. They cared only about the pregnancy, and not about Rosaura, her mother said. Rosaura died the following month, when she was 13 weeks pregnant, as did her fetus.
The fight in Arizona is not just about passing Proposition 139, but about what happens after, attendees at the Phoenix event said. For one thing, Medicaid in Arizona should cover abortion to make it more accessible to everyone who needs it, said Alejandra Gomez, the executive director of Living United For Change in Arizona (LUCHA), and also one of Thursday’s storytellers.
Gomez also said the work to achieve reproductive freedom needs to block targeted restrictions on abortion providers, known as (TRAP) laws, which are onerous, expensive and medically unnecessary requirements that are often imposed on abortion providers and women’s health centers in order to make it more difficult for them to operate.
Gomez, 42, had an abortion during the Great Recession when she was in her 20s, in an unhealthy relationship and when she needed to help her family because her father, a construction worker, had lost his job.
“I found myself faced with the reality of, ‘I’m not going to be able to take care of a child, take care of my family and take care of myself,'” she said. “I also felt that I just wasn’t ready.”
Green Wave freed women imprisoned for miscarriages and stillbirths
The movement for reproductive freedom is not about limits like Arizona’s 15-week restriction, Avila-Guillen said. It’s about allowing families and doctors to make decisions about when to have an abortion, not legislators, she said.
The push for reproductive freedom in Arizona has an exciting energy that reminds Avila-Guillen of Latin American movement for reproductive freedom, she told those gathered in Phoenix.
In four years, the Green Wave in Latin America changed laws in Argentina, Colombia and Mexico and was able to free more than 65 women who were imprisoned for miscarriages and stillbirths in El Salvador, according to Avila-Guillen. The movement was instrumental in ending an emergency contraception ban in Honduras, she said.
“I think that is the message here,,” she said. “We just need to fight back.”
The Latinx Storytelling Tour continues this week at the following Arizona locations:
At 9:30 a.m. Friday Sept. 27 at the Regional Center for Border Health, conference room, 950 E. Main St. Building A in Somerton.At 9:30 a.m. on Saturday, Sept. 28, at the Santa Cruz County 1904 Courthouse, 21 E. Court St., Nogales.At 4 p.m. on Saturday, Sept. 28 in the Carriage House, 125 S. Arizona Ave., Tucson,
Republic reporter Stacey Barchenger contributed to this article.
Reach healthcare reporter Stephanie Innes at [email protected] or follow her on X, formerly Twitter: @stephanieinnes.
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Publish date : 2024-09-27 10:00:00
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