WHEN María Florencia Alcaraz discovered that she was pregnant in 2015 she was unprepared for motherhood. The contraceptives she was taking hadn’t worked. Aged 30, she was employed as a journalist in the justice ministry. With a general election in the offing she worried that she would lose her job under a new government. Unable to end the pregnancy legally in Argentina, she turned to friends for advice. One gave her misoprostol, a stomach-ulcer drug often used to induce abortions. At 13 weeks into her pregnancy she popped the pills alone at home and spent a day in bed. The DIY abortion gave her “a sense of relief and autonomy”, she recalls.
Like many countries in Latin America, where mores have been shaped by the Catholic church, Argentina outlaws most abortions (see map). Women who undergo them can be jailed for four years (or longer if the baby is deemed to be viable outside the womb). The law makes exceptions for pregnancies that are the result of rape or that endanger the...Continue reading
from Americas https://ift.tt/2LrFzIv
via https://ifttt.com/ IFTTT
No comments:
Post a Comment