Speaker 1: Dear listener, It's Maria no Josa and before we start,
Speaker 1: I want to give you a heads up because this
Speaker 1: is not a regular Latino USA episode. Today representing the
Speaker 1: first episode of the network, which is a new series
Speaker 1: that let You Know USA co produced with NPR's Embedded podcast.
Speaker 2: Now.
Speaker 1: This series is about something that is really relevant in
Speaker 1: the United States right now, and that is abortion. But
Speaker 1: it's not the story you might be expecting. Our series
Speaker 1: follows women across the Americas who discovered a method to
Speaker 1: have safe abortions without doctors in countries where abortion was
Speaker 1: pretty much banned, and these women changed how people access
Speaker 1: abortion not only in their countries but around the world,
Speaker 1: including right here in the United States today. For over
Speaker 1: a year, Latin Know USA producers Victoria Estrada and Marta
Speaker 1: Martinez have been reporting on this story and now they're
Speaker 1: going to take us all over the Americas to follow
Speaker 1: this movement made up of women's networks. Here now are
Speaker 1: Martha and Victoria with the first episode of the network.
Speaker 3: It was one of those moments when people understand their
Speaker 3: witnessing history, they remember where they were.
Speaker 4: I was standing at my standing desk in my house,
Speaker 4: waiting and.
Speaker 5: I just started crying at my desk.
Speaker 2: It was totally surreal.
Speaker 6: They remember where they were when Roe versus Wade fell.
Speaker 3: The biggest change to abortion rights in the United States
Speaker 3: and nearly half a century is here.
Speaker 6: The Supreme Court had made its decision.
Speaker 3: Ruling that ends the constitutional right to an abortion. While
Speaker 3: abortion rights opponents celebrated the news that Rowe had been overturned,
Speaker 3: many abortion rights supporters feared the US was going backwards,
Speaker 3: back to the nineteen hundred.
Speaker 7: It's like, what are they going to take from us next?
Speaker 6: Back to a more dangerous time.
Speaker 4: This is an emergency, This is an extreme crisis.
Speaker 3: People will die across the country.
Speaker 6: Protesters gathered on the steps of the Supreme Court in Washington,
Speaker 6: d c. Holding images of code hangers over their heads
Speaker 6: right by by.
Speaker 3: The day after the fall of Row, thirteen states immediately
Speaker 3: banned or severely limited abortion. Eventually nearly half of old
Speaker 3: states did, and within a month of the ruling, dozens
Speaker 3: of clinics stopped performing abortions, forcing many Americans to trouble
Speaker 3: hundreds of miles to get one. Other laws targeted abortion providers.
Speaker 8: Are you scared?
Speaker 9: I am scared, and I think a lot of us
Speaker 9: are because there's nowhere else in medicine that is policed
Speaker 9: and regulated and now criminalized to such a degree.
Speaker 6: But not all abortion rights supporters felt this way.
Speaker 2: Everybody was so calm in the network.
Speaker 6: The network, it's what we're calling the diffuse set of
Speaker 6: people who are expanding abortion access in an unconventional way.
Speaker 6: They were not panicking.
Speaker 8: Everybody was like, we've been doing this work, We're going
Speaker 8: to continue doing this work.
Speaker 2: Nothing is changing. Who cares.
Speaker 8: I'm actually energized.
Speaker 3: This network it's hard to even describe because it's not
Speaker 3: formal or centralized. There's no ceo, no headquarters.
Speaker 6: Some people work together, but plenty don't know each other.
Speaker 6: They're midwives and nurses, grandmothers and friends.
Speaker 3: This network cross borders and reaches people throughout the world,
Speaker 3: from South Africa to Mian March to Mexico and all
Speaker 3: over the United States. What unites the network is how
Speaker 3: they are expanding abortion access by helping women have safe
Speaker 3: abortions on their own without a doctor involved.
Speaker 6: Their method grew out of a very small thing. It
Speaker 6: actually fits in the palm of your hand.
Speaker 3: But despite being physically tiny, when it comes to reproactive health,
Speaker 3: doctors researchers and people working in this field say it's
Speaker 3: been monumental, extraordinarily important.
Speaker 8: It's a lifesaver in so many ways.
Speaker 3: Is the equivalent to the discovery of penicillin, because it's
Speaker 3: a before and.
Speaker 6: After, But unlike penicillin, this discovery has not been universally embraced. Instead,
Speaker 6: it's the latest target of abortion restrictions that continue to
Speaker 6: make the news.
Speaker 7: The future of abortion access could be impacted by a
Speaker 7: new lawsuit just filed by the Attorney General of Texas.
Speaker 7: Long dormant federal law prohibits the nailing of any supplies
Speaker 7: used for abortions.
Speaker 6: Possession could be punishable by up to five years in prison.
Speaker 3: From NPR's Embedded and Futuro Media's Latino Usa, This Is
Speaker 3: the Network.
Speaker 6: A series about the DIY method that tooks safe abortions
Speaker 6: out of the clinic and the women who made it happen.
Speaker 3: Episode one, Santo Tech.
Speaker 6: I'm Victoria Estrada.
Speaker 3: And I'm Marta Martine. We're both producers at the public
Speaker 3: radio show Latino USA. We've been covering reproductive rights in
Speaker 3: the Americas for years now.
Speaker 6: And when we started to see more and more challenges
Speaker 6: to abortion access in the US. We immediately thought about
Speaker 6: Latin America because historically Latin America has had strict abortion bands,
Speaker 6: not so different from what we're seeing now in parts
Speaker 6: of the US.
Speaker 3: But as research from around the world shows, bands don't
Speaker 3: stop people from getting abortions. They just lead them to
Speaker 3: take more risks to end their pregnancies. That's where the
Speaker 3: phrase bacali abortion comes from and where we get the
Speaker 3: image of a woman using a code hanger self managing
Speaker 3: her abortion.
Speaker 6: But nearly forty years ago, in Latin America, women developed
Speaker 6: an abortion method that was medically safe and effective, no
Speaker 6: doctor needed, and this new type of self managed abortion
Speaker 6: transformed how abortions happened across the world today.
Speaker 3: It all started in Brazil, where this method was born
Speaker 3: in the late nineteen eighties. Victoria and I took a
Speaker 3: trip there last year in twenty twenty four, and one
Speaker 3: of the people we interviewed was Jacqueline pe Tanki Hi.
Speaker 10: Jacqueline.
Speaker 3: Jacqueline is a longtime feminist advocate how was Your Day?
Speaker 3: And she lived through Brazil's military dictatorship, which lasted for
Speaker 3: more than two decades. When the dictatorship fell in nineteen
Speaker 3: eighty five, she thought to get women's rights into Brazil's
Speaker 3: new constitution, because women at the time had so little
Speaker 3: say in their workplaces, marriages, or over their bodies.
Speaker 2: So here in front.
Speaker 11: You have the Christ.
Speaker 2: Oh, it's here, right here.
Speaker 3: From Jacqueline's falcony in Rio de Janeiro, we could see
Speaker 3: what's probably the most iconic image of Brazil, the statue
Speaker 3: of Christ the Redeemer. So you see it every day
Speaker 3: in the morning when you wake up, like hello and yeah,
Speaker 3: I say hello, Christ, how are you be good?
Speaker 2: Be good, Jesus Christ.
Speaker 3: Maybe you've seen it in a movie or photos. It's
Speaker 3: this huge sculpture overlooking the whole city of Rio de
Speaker 3: Janeiro on top of this spectacular cliff. It's interesting because
Speaker 3: I was actually talking about this with Victoria this morning,
Speaker 3: that religion is very resent in this city in a
Speaker 3: very visual way, because you have the Christ up there
Speaker 3: in the mountain looking at you all from everywhere.
Speaker 2: Yeah, everywhere, everywhere.
Speaker 3: It's this constant reminder of the influenced Catholicism has had
Speaker 3: on Brazil for much of its history.
Speaker 11: For the careful of church contraception has always been a
Speaker 11: key issue.
Speaker 3: Until the eighties, many Brazilian women didn't have great access
Speaker 3: to birth control before then. In the Burhish region of
Speaker 3: the country, women had an average almost six children.
Speaker 6: We heard that some women just didn't know much about
Speaker 6: their own bodies. For example, some women were afraid of
Speaker 6: using tampons because they thought they might get lost inside
Speaker 6: of their vaginas. We also heard that some women thought
Speaker 6: that their vagina was connected to their mouth.
Speaker 3: This lack of knowledge had serious consequences.
Speaker 11: Significant let's call punishment. It was on women's bodies, death
Speaker 11: or morbidity.
Speaker 5: Okay, could you just count to ten whom doyce.
Speaker 3: In the nineteen eighties, Brazil's maternal mortality rate was higher
Speaker 3: than most of the rest of the world.
Speaker 5: UVV my, do we see you in Mohel?
Speaker 12: I lived through a time when women got sick and died,
Speaker 12: died of infection, died of bleeding, young women, extremely young women.
Speaker 6: This is doctor Rivaldo Albuquerque so medicotetra.
Speaker 12: I am a gynecologist, I am a practicing Catholic and
Speaker 12: I have been working with women's health since I was
Speaker 12: a medical student.
Speaker 6: I visited Rivaldo in the coastal city of Recife in
Speaker 6: northeast Brazil. It's the poorest region in the country. When
Speaker 6: he started working in a public hospital in nineteen eighty five,
Speaker 6: the state that Recife is in had the highest maternal
Speaker 6: mortality rate in all of Brazil. Rivaldo saw it every
Speaker 6: day in the emergency room, a lot of pregnant women
Speaker 6: coming into a r with complications from a lack of
Speaker 6: prenatal care, like chronically high blood pressure, and also complications
Speaker 6: from abortion.
Speaker 3: Abortion was and still is illegal in most cases in Brazil,
Speaker 3: and it was often seen as a sin, but that
Speaker 3: doesn't mean women were not getting abortions. Research from that
Speaker 3: time estimated there were between one and four million abortions
Speaker 3: happening in the country every year.
Speaker 5: I spasushkity on.
Speaker 12: People who had the money could look for doctors who
Speaker 12: did abortions in clinics in hospitals with every safety precaution,
Speaker 12: using sterilized materials.
Speaker 6: In other words, people who had the money could go
Speaker 6: see a doctor who was willing to break the law
Speaker 6: for the right price. Those were not the women who
Speaker 6: ended up in the emergency room where Rivaldo worked. His
Speaker 6: patients had often gone to places that were less reputable
Speaker 6: and unsafe.
Speaker 3: Others just tried to self manage their abortion.
Speaker 10: We heard about lots of ways, herbs, teas or drinks,
Speaker 10: shahs beb in, session of foreign objects, the rods of
Speaker 10: an umbrella, needles, and whatever medicines they could buy at
Speaker 10: the pharmacy.
Speaker 4: You know all the horror stories that you read about.
Speaker 3: By the time women got to Rivaldo, they often had
Speaker 3: perforations in their uterus, hemorrhages, and serious infections.
Speaker 6: Rivaldo told us about a specific case that has stayed
Speaker 6: with him. It was a patient who was only a
Speaker 6: few years younger, and he was at the time.
Speaker 5: Romomili Diziandois Feelius.
Speaker 12: She was a nineteen year old woman who had already
Speaker 12: had two children.
Speaker 13: She came in with a generalized infection.
Speaker 12: It was a desperate condition and we didn't have any
Speaker 12: background information about this woman. She wouldn't speak, She was
Speaker 12: in no position to explain what had happened to her,
Speaker 12: and the person who brought her in didn't want to
Speaker 12: talk either.
Speaker 6: Rivaldo and the other doctors suspected she had an unsafe abortion,
Speaker 6: and so they decided to do an exploratory operation.
Speaker 12: So that we could evaluate the abdomen what was happening
Speaker 12: with this infection. And when we opened the abdominal cavity,
Speaker 12: we found the uterus that smelled part of the word rotten.
Speaker 6: Rivaldo still remembers it.
Speaker 12: A terrible smell with several perforations. It was a classic
Speaker 12: picture of an unsafe abortion. Since it's an illegal procedure.
Speaker 12: The women must have stayed home for a few days
Speaker 12: or didn't receive proper medication.
Speaker 6: Who knows how long she waited to go to the
Speaker 6: hospital after signs that something was wrong, and now there
Speaker 6: was nothing the doctors could do.
Speaker 12: Why did this woman die? I can't tell you without hesitation.
Speaker 12: Because she was black and because she was poor.
Speaker 6: Poqueraigre Rivaldo told us he really felt for these women.
Speaker 12: They are in a situation of suffering, of vulnerability.
Speaker 13: Their health and their life are at risk.
Speaker 12: I know these women, many are Christians, Evangelical, Catholic, but
Speaker 12: they are going through a specific moment in their life.
Speaker 13: They are in need.
Speaker 3: But Rivaldo was an exception. Many doctors did not treat
Speaker 3: these patients well.
Speaker 12: Women who had tried to have an abortion were the
Speaker 12: last ones to be treated during our shifts.
Speaker 3: So these women they would be in the emergency room
Speaker 3: all day long without food or anything to drink.
Speaker 12: They spent the whole day fasting waiting for their procedure
Speaker 12: on an empty stomach, and they are being punished because
Speaker 12: they were the last ones to be taken care of.
Speaker 3: He remembers that some doctors wouldn't give the women enough
Speaker 3: anesthesia before their diletion and curtash or DNC, so the
Speaker 3: women would feel the pain of their cervix being dilated
Speaker 3: and the walls of their urs being scraped.
Speaker 12: And the women cried out because of the pain of
Speaker 12: their suffering. Unfortunately, I heard medical staff say, when you
Speaker 12: did it, it was a lot of joy, a lot
Speaker 12: of pleasure, and now you're crying.
Speaker 13: You don't know what you did. You killed the baby.
Speaker 6: One doctor told researchers at the time that his hospital
Speaker 6: was doing two hysterectomies a week because of so many
Speaker 6: botched abortions. Another doctor called working with these patients a
Speaker 6: quote revolting process because she was presenting us with a
Speaker 6: disgusting mess unquote.
Speaker 3: Some doctors went even further than insulting the women. In
Speaker 3: some cases they called the police.
Speaker 12: And the police would come all the way to the
Speaker 12: hospital and handcuff the women.
Speaker 13: They would chain them to the bed. Women were arrested.
Speaker 3: Rivaldo says his hospital never let this happen, but he
Speaker 3: knew it happened elsewhere.
Speaker 13: The standard for these women.
Speaker 12: So these are things that I will never forget some causes.
Speaker 6: At the end of the shift, Rivaldo would make notes
Speaker 6: about his patients, who lived, who died.
Speaker 12: How many birds, how many sea sections, how many surgeries,
Speaker 12: how many abortions, how many infected abortions.
Speaker 6: And around the year nineteen eighty seven, he noticed a change,
Speaker 6: a big change.
Speaker 12: Severe cases of infections, severe cases of hemorrhage.
Speaker 13: They disappeared.
Speaker 3: Women were still coming into the er, but they were
Speaker 3: showing up with new symptoms, much less serious, ones.
Speaker 12: Like an increasing body temperature hyperthermia. And it didn't make
Speaker 12: sense because you couldn't find an infections condition. Some women
Speaker 12: also had astro intestinal symptoms. We realized that there was
Speaker 12: something different, and this made us a little confused.
Speaker 5: So the show took Kofuzu.
Speaker 6: Around the same time, a researcher named Sara Costa was
Speaker 6: working for Brazil's School of Public Health in Rio de Janeiro,
Speaker 6: more than a thousand miles south from Recife, and she
Speaker 6: noticed another big change.
Speaker 4: We were seeing this incredible decline in fertility.
Speaker 3: Suddenly women were having fewer children but.
Speaker 6: Why it was strange because there were no big policy
Speaker 6: changes to account for it.
Speaker 4: The government wasn't providing much information about how to control fertility,
Speaker 4: and the borshin was still illegal. So something just wasn't
Speaker 4: adding up. Was its spontaneous use of oral contraception. How
Speaker 4: were they getting it?
Speaker 3: So in the early nineties, Sarah began talking directly to
Speaker 3: the women and we conducted.
Speaker 4: Those interviews over a period of several months and analyzed
Speaker 4: the results.
Speaker 3: She and her team interviewed more than eight hundred pregnant
Speaker 3: women in seven hospitals in Rio de Janeiro. Many of
Speaker 3: those women had come into the hospital bleeding. Hospitals in
Speaker 3: Rio and in other parts of the country had been
Speaker 3: seeing more cases like this in the past few years,
Speaker 3: of women who seemed like they had attempted an abortion.
Speaker 4: We thought we would actually discover a lot more complications,
Speaker 4: serious complications, but most of the women went into hospital
Speaker 4: with bleeding, had a cure tage and left left.
Speaker 3: They didn't get stuck in the hospital with infections or
Speaker 3: other complications.
Speaker 4: It was a bit of a surprise.
Speaker 6: In Recife, Rivaldo had noticed a similar pattern.
Speaker 13: We had a downward curve.
Speaker 12: Downward curve in abortion completion, and then there was a
Speaker 12: moment when you almost didn't see any complications of abortion
Speaker 12: at all.
Speaker 5: Praticamuniting now via complicate.
Speaker 6: Fewer complications from abortion meant one thing.
Speaker 13: Women stopped dying.
Speaker 3: Or at least far fewer were dying. From nineteen eighty
Speaker 3: six to nineteen ninety one, the time Sarah and Rivaldo
Speaker 3: were observing, the World Health Organization recorded a twenty one
Speaker 3: percent drop in Brazil's maternal mortality rate.
Speaker 12: It seemed like magic, or a better word, familiari.
Speaker 6: A miracle, the cause of what Rivaldo calls a miracle.
Speaker 6: After the break.
Speaker 3: In nineteen seventy three, the same year that Wade was
Speaker 3: decided in the United States, something else happened that transformed
Speaker 3: reproactive healthcare, but in a much more roundabout way. An
Speaker 3: American pharmaceutical company called CERL developed a new drug to
Speaker 3: gastric ulcers, kind of like TOMS or pepto bismo or
Speaker 3: milk of magnesia. It was a small, white hexagon shaped
Speaker 3: bill with a tiny figure of a stomach edged on
Speaker 3: one side.
Speaker 6: Not a belly, the actual organ.
Speaker 3: It's actually the stomach that makes me remember this bill.
Speaker 6: It's called Cytotech and.
Speaker 3: Even though it was created by an American pharmaceutical company,
Speaker 3: the Food and Drug Administration was slow to approve it,
Speaker 3: several years before being available in the US. Cideattech first
Speaker 3: made its way to Europe and then Brazil in nineteen
Speaker 3: eighty six.
Speaker 6: And here's where it's hard to know what is fact
Speaker 6: and what is part of the myth of side attech,
Speaker 6: because in Brazil this ulcer pill took on a new
Speaker 6: life for starters. We know that the original side attack
Speaker 6: box came with a warning, but because it's been forty years,
Speaker 6: people remember that warning differently.
Speaker 3: Jacqueline Petangi, the sociologist who says hello to the Christ
Speaker 3: statue every morning in Rio de Janeiro, remembers that the
Speaker 3: warning was written out.
Speaker 11: It's that little paper that comes with the medicine that
Speaker 11: says you should avoid to take it if you were
Speaker 11: pregnant because it could cause contractions.
Speaker 6: Doctor Rivaldo Albuquerque remembers the fine priner more specifically, there was.
Speaker 12: A very clear paragraph that said that it should not
Speaker 12: be usually in pregnant women because it could cause uterinin
Speaker 12: contractions and lead to miscarriage.
Speaker 3: Debra Denis, a Brazilian anthropologist and law professor who grew
Speaker 3: up in the eighties remembers the warning as an image
Speaker 3: on the box.
Speaker 7: It was a profile of a pregnant woman, a big
Speaker 7: belly and a warning crossing the belly, and also.
Speaker 3: With call there was a skull.
Speaker 8: There was his call.
Speaker 13: Wow.
Speaker 7: I'm one hundred percent sure of that.
Speaker 3: We haven't been able to confirm this call, but we
Speaker 3: have seen the image of a pregnant woman in a
Speaker 3: circle with a slash through it.
Speaker 6: When the pharma company developed Cida Tech, it discovered that
Speaker 6: the drug had the significant side effect on women, a
Speaker 6: serious side effect. It caused bleeding and contractions that could
Speaker 6: induce a miscarriage.
Speaker 3: So for people who were pregnant and wanted to stay
Speaker 3: that way, it was a very dangerous pill to take.
Speaker 6: But for people who were pregnant and did not want
Speaker 6: to be SATEA Tech's side effect wasn't a problem. It
Speaker 6: was a solution, a new tool to self manage an abortion.
Speaker 6: But unlike the teas and crochet needles women had been using,
Speaker 6: set Attack was overwhelmingly safe and effective.
Speaker 3: And somebody somewhere, somehow figured that out.
Speaker 4: I don't think we ever identified where it started.
Speaker 2: No, it's impossible to know this. Don't forget. We didn't
Speaker 2: have social media. Then there's no records.
Speaker 6: It wasn't like there was a lot of incentive to
Speaker 6: take credit. Whoever did this was likely breaking the law.
Speaker 2: They wouldn't give their name.
Speaker 11: I am Mary Smith, and listen, you can use this
Speaker 11: to induce an abortion.
Speaker 3: Some speculate that it was a pharmacist or a midwife.
Speaker 4: We certainly knew that pharmacists were involved.
Speaker 11: I went to the pharmacy and I bought this.
Speaker 6: But even if we can't know the original source, we
Speaker 6: do know how the knowledge spread far and white.
Speaker 4: The women themselves.
Speaker 7: Women said hah, I have no question and of saying
Speaker 7: that it was from women, Brazilian women. Women continue taking
Speaker 7: it because it was another woman from her family.
Speaker 4: Who shared with her. It certainly wasn't advertised.
Speaker 2: Was in the air.
Speaker 11: I can't tell you when something is in the air
Speaker 11: among women's talks.
Speaker 2: I mean it was in the air.
Speaker 8: Sayra was spreading by word of mouth.
Speaker 3: This is a woman. We're calling by her initial r
Speaker 3: to protect her safety because what she did was and
Speaker 3: still is illegal in Brazil. Process.
Speaker 8: A woman who went through the process would tell another
Speaker 8: hey by that by that.
Speaker 3: The whispers about side attack reached Dart in nineteen eighty six,
Speaker 3: the same year it came on the market in Brazil,
Speaker 3: and she thought it sounded a lot better than the
Speaker 3: first abortion she had been through, the type of dangerous
Speaker 3: abortion Rivaldo had seen time and time again in the
Speaker 3: emergency room in the early eighties.
Speaker 6: The first time ar needed an abortion, she was a minor,
Speaker 6: thirteen or fourteen years old, living in Pacific. She was
Speaker 6: dating someone a lot older than her and ars even
Speaker 6: though she was in a relationship, she understood almost nothing
Speaker 6: about sex or her body because of how she grew up.
Speaker 8: Oh, my mother raised us like potatoes in the ground.
Speaker 6: Our was one of twelve kids.
Speaker 2: What did you cons I had us on sex so well.
Speaker 8: We didn't have the talk about what sex was. I
Speaker 8: just knew that I was going to get kissed. I
Speaker 8: didn't know that the thing was going to create a child,
Speaker 8: so I didn't know that a partner shouldn't cross certain boundaries.
Speaker 6: When Our started feeling funny and her period stopped, she
Speaker 6: confided in her older sister.
Speaker 8: She sat me down and said, look, you're pregnant. There's
Speaker 8: going to be a baby, and we have to find
Speaker 8: a solution. Because Dad is going to kick you out
Speaker 8: of the house, or he's going to kill you.
Speaker 6: Her sister didn't mean it as an exaggeration. She thought
Speaker 6: her dad would literally kill r if he found out
Speaker 6: she was pregnant. He nearly done just that a few
Speaker 6: years earlier.
Speaker 8: To our sister, Eileen Lavish, he once took out his
Speaker 8: gun and tried to kill my sister, the same sister
Speaker 8: who helped me. Because my sister lost her virginity.
Speaker 6: So it was dangerous for ar to stay pregnant, but
Speaker 6: it was also risky to get an abortion, both physically
Speaker 6: and legally. Our sister took her to a midwife, and
Speaker 6: our remembers the midwife inserted a catheter into her cervix
Speaker 6: to induce an abortion. When she returned to her parents' house,
Speaker 6: she had very heavy bleeding and then passed out.
Speaker 8: Okay, Daddy, I actually fell on the bathroom floor. My
Speaker 8: sister picked me up, showered me, and told my mother,
Speaker 8: I'm going to take her because she's having her period.
Speaker 8: It's very strong and she's weak. She didn't tell my father.
Speaker 6: Our sister took her to the hospital. While she was there,
Speaker 6: doctors questioned her. They wanted to know if she'd done
Speaker 6: anything to cause an abortion. Ar kept denying she had,
Speaker 6: even when they threatened her with jail.
Speaker 8: Is he no? I said, no, of course I had
Speaker 8: to deny it. I was told to deny it. It
Speaker 8: was a crime that involved a lot of people.
Speaker 6: Right Ur was given a DNC to complete her abortion.
Speaker 6: The doctors told her she nearly perforated her uterus and
Speaker 6: had been at risk of losing it. R stayed in
Speaker 6: the hospital for several days to recover in a maternity
Speaker 6: room with other women who'd attempted an abortion.
Speaker 8: All of them had done something, and the one next
Speaker 8: to me.
Speaker 6: She died, died. I asked why, Yes.
Speaker 8: I had a curatage right then I was fine, but
Speaker 8: the one next to me, she never came back.
Speaker 3: A few years later, when I was nineteen years old,
Speaker 3: she got pregnant a second time.
Speaker 5: She says.
Speaker 3: The guy she had seen just a couple of times
Speaker 3: forced himself on her. I decided to have another abortion,
Speaker 3: but this time it was a very different experience because
Speaker 3: of cytotech aparash trity.
Speaker 8: It was for gastritis. So they sold it at the pharmacy.
Speaker 8: Like water, you just go in and say, hey, give
Speaker 8: me a box of cyitotech. Anyone could buy it.
Speaker 3: The pharmacy she bought it from told her to swallow
Speaker 3: two pills, wait a couple of hours, then take two
Speaker 3: more pills until she finished six pills. He also gave
Speaker 3: her an instruction that was very common at the time.
Speaker 8: Oh, look, you were going to expel. When you expel,
Speaker 8: when you're bleeding a lot, go to the hospital.
Speaker 3: I went home and took the pills.
Speaker 8: So the contraction started and I had some leading, she says.
Speaker 3: The pain was strong, but not like with the first abortion.
Speaker 3: She was bleeding, but she didn't faint. She didn't have
Speaker 3: her sister by her side, but she was able to
Speaker 3: get herself to the emergency room. One thing was the same.
Speaker 3: The doctors again questioned her and again are denied that
Speaker 3: she had done anything to cause an abortion, and this
Speaker 3: time arsas she didn't have to stay in the hospital.
Speaker 3: She had a DNC and left. Her parents never found
Speaker 3: out about it. Art went on with her life. She
Speaker 3: moved in with her sister, who supported her going.
Speaker 8: To school in form so I graduated as a social worker.
Speaker 3: The two experiences were very difficult for r but one
Speaker 3: thing was clear.
Speaker 8: The second time, I didn't have a lot of side effects.
Speaker 8: I didn't have a lot of bleeding, so it was
Speaker 8: safer for me. I felt more comfortable Festal.
Speaker 6: Still, she wishes she'd had more support because r and
Speaker 6: women like her who took side attech to cause an
Speaker 6: abortion in those early years, they were experimenting on themselves.
Speaker 6: It's not like the pills came with a slip of
Speaker 6: paper explaining how to have an abortion.
Speaker 3: In fact, if you remember, the instruction said don't take
Speaker 3: this pill if you're pregnant.
Speaker 6: In nineteen ninety three, researchers from a public university in
Speaker 6: the country published a study called side Attack in Brazil
Speaker 6: at Least it doesn't kill. In it, most women reported
Speaker 6: taking between four and sixteen pills, but some reported taking dozens.
Speaker 6: It's likely that ar didn't take the right dose to
Speaker 6: have a complete abortion.
Speaker 3: But over time, Brazilian women again figured out something by themselves.
Speaker 4: One of the interesting things that I noted in my
Speaker 4: research is that women got much better at using cytotech.
Speaker 3: This is Sarah Costa again, the researcher in Rio de Janeiro.
Speaker 3: While she conducted the study in the early nineties, several
Speaker 3: years after cytotech became available, she heard about how women
Speaker 3: were taking the bills, put.
Speaker 4: The manto your tongue or in set the menual vagina.
Speaker 3: Eventually they started getting better results.
Speaker 4: At the beginning, I would say that a lot of
Speaker 4: women needed cureitage, but it turned out once they got
Speaker 4: better at using it, they were actually having complete abortions.
Speaker 3: In other words, they no longer needed a DNC. How
Speaker 3: long was your data collection period?
Speaker 2: I think it was about.
Speaker 4: Six to nine months.
Speaker 2: First it's fast.
Speaker 4: Yeah, so you know, we were able to observe change.
Speaker 6: Of the women who went to a hospital after having
Speaker 6: an abortion, Sarah found that nearly sixty percent reported using
Speaker 6: Sida tech to self manage it. She wrote that this
Speaker 6: represented quote only the tip of the iceberg, because many
Speaker 6: more women could have taken side attech and not needed
Speaker 6: medical help. According to our research, the median dose the
Speaker 6: women were taking was eight hundred micrograms four pills, which
Speaker 6: is the same dose the World Health Organization now recommends
Speaker 6: for pregnancies up to twelve weeks.
Speaker 3: And how are they getting this information? Sarah found that
Speaker 3: the overwhelming majority of women who used Sido tech eighty
Speaker 3: four percent had learned about it from friends, relatives, or colleagues.
Speaker 3: It was the network starting to form women loosely connected
Speaker 3: by whispers. Just by sharing their experiences what worked and
Speaker 3: what didn't work, they began to build knowledge.
Speaker 7: Women know how to be scientists at home when science
Speaker 7: is not offering what they need.
Speaker 6: This is Devorah Denis Agan, the Brazilian anthropologist law professor
Speaker 6: who remembers the skull on the side attack box.
Speaker 7: So basically, it's about observation, it's about taking experiments in
Speaker 7: our own bodies, and it's about sharing with others.
Speaker 6: She calls it domestic science, and she saw the results
Speaker 6: of this domestic science for herself. By the time she
Speaker 6: learned about side attack, it was no good deal.
Speaker 7: So I was at school in the eighties when I
Speaker 7: saw for the first time a classmate with the pills,
Speaker 7: telling us I'm going to take them today.
Speaker 6: Her classmate got the pills through a family member and
Speaker 6: they worked.
Speaker 7: Can you believe that the day after she was in school.
Speaker 3: I'm wondering why you think cito tech became so popular
Speaker 3: so quickly.
Speaker 7: Let me try five reasons. One, it was discovered by women,
Speaker 7: It was shared from women to women. It proved to
Speaker 7: walk and to be safe. It was used for an
Speaker 7: essential need to women's lives, and it was available at
Speaker 7: the community level, and it was cheap, very cheap.
Speaker 3: Pharmacists in Brazil told us they sold it for about
Speaker 3: five bucks in the early nineties, compared to five hundred
Speaker 3: dollars for an abortion at a private clinic. At the time,
Speaker 3: cide Attech sales exploded. Researchers tracked that in the late
Speaker 3: eighties and early nineties, more than fifty thousand boxes of
Speaker 3: the pill were being sold in Brazil every month.
Speaker 6: Actually, there are more reasons women chose cide attack. In
Speaker 6: that same report from nineteen ninety three, CEDA Tech in Brazil,
Speaker 6: at least it doesn't kill. The researchers interviewed women who
Speaker 6: had used it. In their testimonies, they described lots of
Speaker 6: reasons for liking it. We had voice actors read some
Speaker 6: of their quotes aloud.
Speaker 3: Since it wasn't a procedure requiring a doctor's expertise, it
Speaker 3: didn't exactly feel like an abortion to some of these women.
Speaker 8: It's less traumatic, a lot less. You know what the
Speaker 8: sensation is. The sensation is that your period is late,
Speaker 8: and so you take medicine for it to come.
Speaker 6: As a result, some women describe feeling less guilty taking
Speaker 6: the pill.
Speaker 3: If I have gone to a clinic, I would never
Speaker 3: have forgiven myself, and women felt it put them, not
Speaker 3: their partners or doctors in control.
Speaker 14: Using side attack is something that is yours. Nobody has
Speaker 14: to know what you did or you didn't do. No
Speaker 14: one invades your privacy. Even the gynecologists that I went
Speaker 14: to later didn't know that I had had an abortion.
Speaker 6: Women who wanted abortions weren't the only ones who appreciated
Speaker 6: side attack. Many doctors did too, because they didn't have
Speaker 6: to deal with so many gruesome cases or do such
Speaker 6: serious procedures like having to remove a uterus. One doctor
Speaker 6: in sel Paulo told the researchers that he seemed hasterectomsdropped
Speaker 6: from two a week to one every six months.
Speaker 3: When we asked Rivaldo the Ovigian receive how he remembers
Speaker 3: feeling at the time, he used one word.
Speaker 5: I'll leave you relief. I leave the.
Speaker 3: Relief of mind and of conscience, simpme.
Speaker 5: We to peel it.
Speaker 12: I was happy because I saw that what we couldn't do,
Speaker 12: which was to help women, the network was doing it,
Speaker 12: and that's what I wanted.
Speaker 13: I wanted women to be healthy.
Speaker 12: So if I couldn't do it effectively, the network was
Speaker 12: doing it.
Speaker 6: Rivaldo told us that feminists and health providers coined the nickname.
Speaker 5: For some attack ashin Shamavady, Santo Techi, Sondy, Santo Santo Techi.
Speaker 6: They called it Santo.
Speaker 3: Tech, cyto tech, Santa tech. It has many names. You
Speaker 3: might know it as miso prosto aka miso like the
Speaker 3: soup or misto.
Speaker 6: There's no agreement on how to pronounce it. Experts believe
Speaker 6: it's now the most commonly used abortion pill in the world,
Speaker 6: and the World Health Organization says it's safe to self
Speaker 6: manage with pills through twelve weeks of pregnancy.
Speaker 3: Later in the series, we follow the network as it
Speaker 3: spreads this pill across Latin America.
Speaker 6: I was like, what, no way, and into the US. Oh,
Speaker 6: there's a whole of you, and you're all like underground
Speaker 6: and secret squirrel and using different names.
Speaker 2: It was just mind blowing.
Speaker 10: Up.
Speaker 3: Next, women create an entirely new support system around me.
Speaker 3: So that challenges the medical establishment and the law al
Speaker 3: e sib.
Speaker 11: Someone was going to do what we didn't dare to
Speaker 11: because we had a license and we were afraid of
Speaker 11: the law.
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