The Network: Breaking Bread

Hey, their dear listener. It's Marie Noo Hossan and today we're sharing with you episode two of the Network. It's a new series that Latino USA co produced with NPR's Embedded podcast. Now, if you haven't listened to the first episode, of course, I recommend that you do that first. Check it out on the embedded feed or listen to last

Saintotech. That was the name that some Brazilian doctors started calling sidetech in the nineteen eighties because far fewer women were dying from abortion complications thanks to this ulcer pill, but not everyone was ready to canonize it. During the nineties, the Brazilian government cracked down on side attack the commercial

Oh my fashion.

A cleaning lady has been arrested. She suspected of having a clandestine abortion.

But despite official attempts to control me so, the secret was out Reproactive health workers in Latin America heard about the pill when they traveled. Some people got some from Columbia, and then some people got some from Brazil from a Peruvian city in the Amazon jungle. And she said, here we use a bill, And I said, what bill is that? Two huge feminist gatherings across Latin America called quintros, where women chatted about it in the hallways.

We were in a group talking and they said.

Look, we've been using Cytottech and it's working well.

Part of the pill was moving out of Brazil to countries where abortion was also mostly banned and deeply stigmatized.

And so we were just like, well, well, how do we use.

This activists who are getting their hands on me? So saw its potential widespread access to safe abortions, but to make that happen, they needed to get organized, which sparked a whole new set of questions.

How could they talk about something that had been almost unspeakable, and even if they did, was talking enough. This episode, we're going to Ecuador, Argentina, and Mexico, all places where the women who make up this diffuse network took on these questions, teaming up, challenging each other, sometimes even breaking

Episode two, Breaking Bread the activist in Latin America who knew about Miso had a problem. Abortion was highly criminalized, it was stigmatized. How could they get women access to something illegal, something that was shrouded in shame.

The obvious option was to keep the conversation and their actions hidden, whispering sister to sister, and that's basically what happened for more than a decade.

But in two thousand and eight, activists in Latin America took a totally different tack. In the middle of Quito, Ecuador, there's a statue of a virgin lavir ghindl Panicido. She's slightly taller than Rio di Janeto's famous Christ the Redeemer. She has wings spread out like an angel. One day, a group of women decided to pull a stunt. They were a mix of Ecuadorian activists and activists from Women on Waves, an abortion axis organization based in the Netherlands.

There are two guards there, so we need some beautiful blonze to distract them.

A twenty fourteen documentary called Vessel recorded their efforts.

We are occupying the Virgin let a lot of women.

They hung a big white banner on the balcony of the Virgin Statue. The banner said safe abortion with a phone number. That number was for the first abortion hotline in Latin America. The documentary shows them getting nearly eighty calls within the first few hours.

Hello saloons.

This idea for a hotline and the stunt promoting it through the Latin American network into a new, more public era. They reached thousands of women this way. Their work was bold, it was organized, and maybe most importantly, it was replicable. Women in other countries had been watching what happened in Ecuador, and a.

Year later Argentina started its own hotline, and so initial.

In the beginning, the hot line was so bare bones the view of the We had a small backpack with the Nokia eleven hundred.

Militian and notebooks and.

Flash cards and a process we had built rigorously.

This is Anamins, one of the first volunteers of the Argentinian helpline. She was part of the collective Lesbians and Feminists for Abortion Decriminalization. She and I talked in her living room in Buenos Aires, with her cat sitting on her lap. It was starting to face. She told me that when they started the helpline in the summer of two thousand and nine, they were just a dozen volunteers. They didn't climb a statue. Instead, they put up posters

Demand was four more. It was always for a lot more.

Volunteers gave callers step by step information on how to self manage an abortion.

With MISO and Argentina, no one had ever done what this collective was doing, speaking so openly about abortions and how to do it on your own. Not everyone was happy about it.

I said, do we have to do this so public? You are nuts.

This is Mariana Romero, the executive director of STATIS, the Center for State and Society Studies. She's a prominent reproductive health researcher and advocate for abortion rights in Argentina. Marianna and other feminists worried that the helpline could inadvertently reduce access to me.

So you are going to make the pharmaceutical company that produced mysoposal take it out of that market.

That wasn't the only risk of their work. The helpline was operating in uncharted territory since abortion was mostly banned. The volunteers worried any work they did on abortion could put them or the women they helped in jail. But as the years passed, no helpline volunteers were ever arrested.

And so they got more provocative with the way they talked about abortion. A year after launching the helpline, they printed a manual explaining how to self manage an abortion by taking miso without a doctor. It's thorough, more than one hundred pages long. The cover is all pink, with two big rainbows and a bunch of bills with smiley faces and on the back.

On the back, I had a picture of a Barbie and a huge rainbow.

She's in a pink convertible with sunglasses and a glamorous scarf over her head.

And in a fun fun it said Barbie had to go. It was awesome, Barbie said.

Anna says women were hungry for this information.

It was a best seller. I had two printings of ten thousand copies each.

Anna like a lot of the early helpline volunteers is a lesbian. She saw echoes of her own experience in the shame and stigma that women faced when they wanted an abortion. She says the helpline and the manual were driven by a lesbian philosophy.

The now closet, refusing to be in the closet no stigma of getting out there and saying yes, we're.

Here, being public was one pillar of the helpline strategy. The other was relying on science. Both the manual and the script that the helpline volunteers used were based on scientific research.

Starting in the nineties, researchers from around the world had taken an interest in what Latin American activists had been doing. They ran studies on women taking miso to end their pregnancies in places all over the globe, from Africa to Southeast Asia. Sometimes researchers worked in partnership with the activist. Over and over. They found that using miso in this way was safe and effective, and they developed best practices

Anna herself was able to help thousands of women through the helpline, but sometimes as she spoke to women, Anna wanted to stay in touch.

If a specific story affected me and made me anxious and I wanted to stay involved, a colleague would say, no, no, it's not your role. We didn't have the capacity, and in political terms, that wasn't our project.

But other activists were concerned. They were aware of all the hype around abortion health lines, but skeptical about the approach.

How do you know for sure that those women are not at risk? You gave them information and then what no.

Less concilio.

Did she get appeals or didn't she? Did she end up in the hospital? Did she do something wrong? You actually don't know anything.

This is Veronica Cruz who goes by Verto. She's an activist in Mexico doing something completely different than the helplines, something that would push the envelope much further. After the break, we follow Vetro to Mexico.

The helplines, the Barbie manual. All of it was aimed at spreading the word about Miso and changing how people were talking about abortion.

But Veronica, who you heard for the break and who goes vi Vero didn't think spreading information was enough. She used a different strategy in the feminist collective she started in Mexico. The collective is called Las Libres, which means the free.

Las libres is maybe de la compagna Minto's maybe deloiquatro cie Las.

Libres is my life. A companiamentto is my life. I can do it twenty four to seven.

A companiamento. That's the name of her approach.

Usually people translate a companiamento as accompaniment. It's not a word you use in English very often, but in Spanish you hear it all the time. It can mean being with someone but also supporting them or just keeping them company.

I love the root of the word, which comes from Latin companies. It means the people you break bread with, your companions, the people you trust.

And for abortion, it's come to mean being there during the whole process, from beginning to end, regardless of the legal.

Risks based on our reporting. Veto's collective Las Liveres, was the first group in Latin America and possibly the world, to start doing accompanimento with miso why not Positions? I visited Veto last fall at the Las Liveres office in Juanajuato, a city in central Mexico. Wow, stovill la vista. Their office is more homey than corporate. It's in a three story house that's nestled into the hills.

Akisi Yea.

Veto founded lasire Is nearly a decade before any of the helplines started. At the time, abortion in Mexico was essentially banned in the state where Veto lives. The only exception was for women who were raped, but even in those cases, hospitals often denied women the right to the procedure. So Vedo was working with a Gayna college is to help women who'd been raped get legal abortions, and in two thousand, this doctor, like a growing number of doctors

I was like, what, no way.

It was nothing like a surgical abortion, and Veto had a realization I mean I.

Can do it cost Yes, I can just buy the pills tell the woman how to use them. That was like an incredible discovery for me.

Not long after, a woman came to the last Liveless office Medico.

She told me I'm not a rape victim, but I also want to interrupt.

Interrupt her pregnancy. This woman didn't qualify for legal abortion in Mexico because she wasn't a rape survivor. So Veto didn't send her to the doctor.

And I think.

Victim Ada lession I.

Said, we don't have to tell anyone if she was or wasn't a victim, that it's going to stay here between us.

Veto decided to accompany the woman through the whole process, even though it was risky. Where Vero lived, any method of ending a pregnancy that wasn't a result of rape carried a prison sentence for the woman and anyone who helped her. But unlike in Brazil, in Mexico, misa was easy to get. Even though you technically needed a prescription, you could often get it over the counter. So Veto told the woman to just go buy the pills, and she did. She got the miso and went home.

Sando I was always.

Monitoring her for any complications. Even though Veto had seen how the pills work, how easy it was to use them, she says it was nerve wracking to support someone through an abortion without a doctor.

Then, so I slept with my cel phone on my chest all the time, like in case it rank or something.

The next day, the woman went to a doctor who confirmed her pregnancy had ended without any complications. Veto's first time doing accompaniamento had gone smoothly. After that, when someone contacted las Levitz for an abortion and they were not rape survivors, Las Leivas didn't send her to the kindacologists they'd been working with. They handled it themselves.

We promised ourselves that we were never going to leave anyone without access whatever we had to do.

If a woman couldn't afford to buy miso, which was expensive in Mexico, Las Leaves would give her the pills for free. If a woman could afford me. So sometimes she had left over pills. Veto suggested what to do with them.

Q two.

I told them the next woman who comes, you are going to give her the pills as a gift, and you are going to tell her about your experience.

Veto would set up a meeting between the two women in a park or at a mall. The woman who'd had an abortion would share her leftover pills and her story. Eventually, some women did this even when Vedo hadn't asked so.

So for Multiply Candon multiplic Cando multiply Candle.

That was multiplying and multiplying and multiplying.

By connecting women directly one by one, Las Livides was recruiting volunteers and growing the network a person.

There are people from those beginnings who are still at company or even started their own groups.

Les Livides helped create accompaniment networks that today reached every state in Mexico. But over the years some activists criticized Veto's approach. For them, real change was changed ing the law. Veto remembers one conference where activists told her that what she was doing compromised their movement for abortion rights. They didn't want to be associated with people like her who were breaking the law.

They said that what we were doing of accompanying the women and giving them the bills was risky for us, for us and for the whole movement Portos, because if they arrest you, it's like they are going to come for everyone.

But Veto believed the system she'd help create was necessary and more humane than what the helplines across Latin America offered. And she actually didn't care if others were worried that her methods might damage legalization efforts.

Mamselle, if we got.

Down the legalization route, we'll never finish, or it will take a very long time, so we need concrete answers.

Many activists in the network across Latin America found themselves on opposite sides. Some were fighting to legalize abortion. Those women were playing the long game, you might say. Others were actively breaking the law because women who needed abortions immediately couldn't wait until the law changed. But one group realized they didn't have to make a choice between the two sides. That's after the break A companiaminto with me So started in Mexico, but in Argentina women took it

Yea Mohamunavia we said, let's make a form, yeah, amasumo, let's do a little follow up.

The Socaristas survey was exhaustive, so that's amar.

We were annoying, really annoying with the women.

They asked straightforward questions like how many weeks pregnant were you? Did you have a successful abortions? You need to tell us because this is going to be useful for others.

He important.

Other questions were more personal, why did you decide to have an abortion? Does your partner know? Are you religious?

And I think it's because we were conscious that we were also producing science prosamba.

They tracked the data on spreadsheets, carefully documenting trends in women's experiences self managing with Miso and the Socaristas quickly noticed that a lot of women were finding them in pretty unexpected ways.

Thirty percent had come to us recommended by healthcare professionals, and that's when we said, Greta, what's happening, queneson who are they?

Ruth was surprised. In general, doctors in Argentina were not on board with abortion, especially when they weren't happening in hosts hospitals. So Socoristas wanted to understand why medical staff were referring patients to them a group that was working outside the medical system and the law, so they used gorilla tactics to build relationships with them. They started scheduling appointments with these doctors as if they were personal appointments, so that they could talk to them in private.

Marnavin and we started creating a bond with professional medical staff, and then we started asking them, what's the problem if you write two prescriptions a month for us and nothing right? And they write us two or three prescriptions for us with different dates, and we'd get male names from friends or sons la retas and the prescriptions would be under male names.

Not something socoristas do anymore. And when they did it, it was illegal. Many feminists weren't comfortable with Ruth's work. She was a little bit too radical for me. This is Mariana Romero again, she's the reproductive health researcher you heard earlier who thought to legalize abortion in Argentina.

Radical how well, because they were open about having abortions at home and being with women having their abortions at home.

I was like, what, just like with les levities in Mexico, Feminists in Argentina worried that Socoristas would damage their country's movement for abortion rights because it would be associated with criminal activity, but some of the doctors and nurses Agorista's scheduled appointments with were happy to help, even though they

Do you know what we felt, Olivia, Relief, Ivase.

Someone was going to do what we didn't dare to because we had a license and we were afraid of the law.

Alais.

A general practitioner named Naria Scharbowski told me she gladly signed the prescription every once in a while confience.

I trusted them and I believed in the practice, but also to feel like I was contributing in a tiny way.

A few years later, research showed that doctors had reason to trust the Sokoristas. A study published in an influential academic journal called The Lancet Global Health found that abortions with the Socoristas support were just as safe and effective as those that happened in a clinic, and then in twenty.

Eighteen, Argentine lawmakers began an historic debate on legalizing abortion.

More than a thousand, thirty years after feminists in Argentina started a movement to legalize abortion, the Argentina and Congress considered a law that would make abortion a right. More than seven hundred people gave speeches at the Congress, including helpline volunteers and the soaparistas. Since socaristas had been accompanying women through their abortions, they had specific stories they could share. This is a socarista reading the words of women who

Chicos no Kiromas.

Sogoristas had all these stories from the survey responses. The data they've been tracking for five years. In that time did accompanied nearly twenty thousand abortions.

This data challenged beliefs that Argentinians had Sogaristas showed that the women who are most likely to have abortions were already mothers, and that many of them were religious.

Here's Ruth Againita, How did so Gorristas contribute? The one thing I considered the most important is that we erased the idea of abortion as a clandestine practice. We said, people here are having abortions. You can have a safe abortion, yes see, and you can do it at home.

Some of the other feminists who testified in front of Congress, like the researcher Mariana Rometo, had been critical of the Socorristas, but she and other skeptics came around.

They were radical. But if they weren't, I don't know if things would have happened the way they happened.

From sharing information about the pills in hallways at feminist gatherings to taking abortion out of the closet to building a whole support system for women having self managed abortions. Feminist efforts decade after decade helped change the law, and

Argentina was just the beginning the campaign there to legalize abortion, which brought together a broad range of feminist groups inspired feminists all over Latin America. Argentinians made the green bandana the symbol for their movement, and the fight to legalize abortion across the region became known as the Green Wave, and then within a couple of years, Colombia and Mexico decriminalized abortion.

Mexico's Supreme Court has declared loudly and clearly that access to abortion care is a human right.

This major legal shift made news all over the world.

In other words, Mexico just got its Row versus Wade today.

And at the center of this whole movement was a tiny pill.

Mis technology misso brussel is a technological revolution that when you put it in the hands of women and those who need an abortion, heinera is saut. It generates another revolution. It's a cultural, social, political, medical revolution.

But the news up north sounded very different.

Thank you for joining us on a day that changed America or outside the Supreme Court after the landmark decision that overturned Roe versus Weighed and ended a woman's constitutional right to an abortion. As you can see behind.

The same year Columbia decriminalized abortion, the US was moving in the opposite direction.

Are just absolutely terrified, outrage, discussed anger.

They are experiencing biraling anxiety in some states, like we're talking about homicide charges.

In our final episode, we follow the network to the United States. Yeah, we've certainly been called drug dealers. We've been called murderers, abortionists, you know, you name it. That's next time on the network. All episodes of the network are available right now.

If you want more about the network, like photos from Martha's trip to Argentina, go to NPR dot org slash Embedded Network. That's NPR dot org slash embedded Network.

The Network from Embedded is a collaboration with Latino USA, a production of Futuro Media.

This episode was produced by Adelina Lancianese, Ariana Garibli, Nica Moreles Garcia, and Abby Wendel. Rayna Cohen edited the series.

Fact checking by Cecil Davis Vasquez and Nicolet Kahan. Robert Rodriguez mastered the episode.

Leanna Simpstrom is our supervising senior producer. Katie Simon is our supervising senior editor. Ireneagucci is our executive producer, and Colin Campbell is the Senior Vice President for Podcasting at MPR.

The embedded team also includes Luis Treis and Dan Germa.

From Latino USA. Our executive producers are Merlin Bishop and Pennile Raminez, and our production managers are Jessica Ellis and Nancy Druchuillo.

Thanks to our Managing Editor of Standards and Practices, Tony Kevin, and to Johannes Durghi and Micah Ratner for legal support and Tommy Evans, MPR's managing editor Editorial Review. Our visuals editor is Emily Bogel. Original tail art by Luke Medina, voiceovers.

By Alejandra Marquez, Hanse Lauas Tobarra, Mariavasquez, Rosamontees, Monica Moreles Garcia, Gabriela Simon, se de Jidro and Andrea de Alva Alvarez.

Special thanks to d red Wine, Susanna Chavez, Alisa Caccpardoel Caino, Mabuel Bianco, Julia mcgrenod Spades, Alissa add Warni, Selina Simons Steffen and Kiara Eisner.

Archival footage from Urine News, vessel Agenza Pado and the YouTube channel for the National Campaign for Safe, Legal and Free Abortions in Argentina and a big thanks to our embedded plus supporters.

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Thanks for listening.

For Escuta.

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