I was bleeding while the doctor was talking to the nurse. My friend and I were perched on plastic chairs, scared and confused. The nurse rolled her eyes at me. The doctor’s mouth curled into a sneer. I heard the word “aborto” – “abortion” in Spanish. Then they turned away from us to exchange slow banter.
I was in Quito, Ecuador for over a year. My Spanish was good, but I had never learned the word for miscarriage. “I’m not pregnant anymore” I managed to say.
I woke up hours earlier with sheets dark with blood and cramps worse than any I’ve ever experienced. Looking at the sheets, I knew it wasn’t a normal heavy cycle, but I didn’t know I was pregnant.
After the bleeding did not stop, we went to the hospital. I looked out the car window at the colonial-era buildings of Quito. I loved this town so high in the Andes. I had a vague idea that abortion was illegal, but I didn’t think it had anything to do with my situation.
I was wrong.
I learned that because abortion is illegal in Ecuador, many women have had unsafe abortions or attempted self-abortions. When things went wrong, they would go to the hospital as a last resort to stop the bleeding or treat the infection, claiming they were having a miscarriage to avoid prosecution. In 2014, deaths from these abortions accounted for 15.6 percent of all deaths in the country, Reuters reported.
I became a suspect in a crime
Women who, like me, experience incomplete miscarriages may need medical intervention to stop the bleeding and make sure all the tissue passes from the uterus. The treatment of an incomplete miscarriage is the same as the treatment of a planned abortion.
When the nurse finally put me on the gurney, I tried to say that I wanted a local anesthetic, not a general. Being unconscious in an unfamiliar hospital, at the mercy of people who treated me with suspicion and disdain scared me far more than the procedure itself.
I learned a harsh truth the other day: A ban on abortion is not just a ban on abortion. It turns any woman who has a gynecological emergency into a criminal suspect.
In a way, I was lucky. As a foreigner who could pay, I probably received better care than the average Ecuadorian. I was quite disoriented at the time and blocked out the details. But I think we paid $200 in cash before they even operated on me.
The next thing I remember is my friend gently shaking me in the recovery room. “You’ve been out for almost an hour,” he said. “I thought you were in a coma.”
I was glad to be back in the US when we got back
When I returned to the US, I was relieved to be back where abortion was safe and legal and where no one would suspect me of faking a miscarriage to have an abortion. I was back in a country where many women – myself included – received their primary care from clinics, often free of charge, that also provided abortions.
Overturning Roe v. Wade throws all of that out the window. If you miscarry in an American state that restricts abortion, you may face worse than I did in Ecuador. There are already examples of women in the US being prosecuted for miscarriages. This can only become more common.
I don’t want to demonize Ecuador or Latin America, because abortion is legal in Argentina, Cuba, Uruguay, and Mexico, sort of. In December, Mexico’s Supreme Court declared that abortion is no longer a crime, although its exact status varies by state. The difference is that in Mexico reproductive rights are moving forward, while in the US they are being rolled back.
Erin Van Reenen is a writer, teacher, and traveler who just finished a novel set in Central America.
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