In Progress

SHE had just found out that she was pregnant with her seventh child. Her husband was a furniture maker who had been unemployed for some time, and she was  having an increasingly difficult time scrounging for money to buy food for her family. “I didn’t even have enough money to go to the hilot (a traditional healer who provided deep-massage abortion, among other health services),” she told me, and so she decided to abort the fetus herself.

“I heard about how other women would insert a piece of wire up their vagina to induce bleeding, and so one morning, when my husband was away and the children were in school, I took down part of the clothesline and, while squatting, I pushed the piece of wire up my vagina,” she recalled. The pain was excruciating, she remembers, and, through her tears and sweat, she noticed that there was a statue of the Virgin Mary on an altar in front of where she was squatting. “Even as I was about to faint, I kept crying out in my head: ‘Forgive me, please forgive me!’” She finally passed out from the pain, and when relatives found her, bleeding and unconscious, they rushed her to the hospital.

She managed to end that particular pregnancy but got pregnant two more times, bringing the total number of surviving children to eight.