She maneuvered her walker to a nearby chair and sank down. On the morning of June 24th, as she was making coffee in a kitchen where photographs of her great-grandchildren covered the fridge, she heard on the radio that the constitutional right to abortion in the United States had ended. Among those expats is Liz, a retired Southern woman in her seventies. Some Americans visit for a week and decide to stay. It is just as famous for its charm: cobblestone streets, Baroque churches, bright houses, and lively cantinas once frequented by Mexican muralists and Beat poets. The town of San Miguel de Allende, in central Mexico, is known as the birthplace of legendary independence leaders. Hear from women distributing abortion medication illegally, on The New Yorker Radio Hour. Taking the baggie and some instructions on how to take the medication, the woman thanked Anna and fled the park, hoping that her husband would never realize she’d been gone. Anna’s pills, which were free, were her best option. The prospect of having another child, she said, was like “getting a death sentence.” She couldn’t vanish from her household for a day without explanation, travel to a state where abortion is legal, and pay seven hundred dollars to a doctor for a prescription. Hands shaking, the woman told Anna that she was already raising three children and had been trying to save enough money to remove them from a dangerous home. Her distress, as Anna understood it, was less about a breach of Texas law than about the possibility that her husband, who was violent, might find out what she was doing. As Anna pulled a plastic bag of pills from her pocket and settled across from the pregnant woman at a picnic table, she registered the fear on the woman’s face. (Given the legal exposure, pseudonyms have been used for Anna and other American women who let me into their underground networks.)īy the time the pregnant woman for whom Anna was waiting walked up, the trailhead was quiet enough to make the chirping of birds seem jarring. Until last year, abortion was considered a crime in most of Mexico, the second-biggest Catholic country in the world, and women there had become adept at providing safe abortions in secrecy. She and other women defying abortion bans had turned to a model developed by Verónica Cruz, a prominent Mexican activist. Providing the tools for an abortion in Texas had become a felony that could lead to years in prison, and a fellow-citizen could sue Anna and collect upward of ten thousand dollars for every abortion she was found to abet.Īnna wasn’t a fainthearted woman-someone who had recently approached her for pills noted her “cottage-core vibes” and steely calm-but she wasn’t reckless, either. In some of the states, laws that originated as far back as the nineteenth century had been restored. Wade, Texas and thirteen other states had effectively banned abortion, and more were sure to follow. Since late June, when the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. But the pills in her pocket were used to induce abortions, and in Texas, her home state, their distribution now required such subterfuge, along with burner phones and the encrypted messaging app Signal. She felt slightly absurd in her disguise-sun hat, oversized sunglasses, plain black mask. The young woman carrying the pills, whom I’ll call Anna, arrived in advance of the designated time, as was her habit, to throw off anyone who might try to use her license plates to trace her identity. The handoff was planned for late afternoon on a weekday, at an underused trailhead in a Texas park.
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