I’ve heard your explanation. It’s clear to me: my abortion happened over 8 years ago and my name won’t be disclosed. Thank you for listening, it’s what matters the most to me.

I have many other friends who have had abortions too. I did it, and I have no trauma. I know that the sad stories are not ours, but those of the women who couldn’t abort. Have you heard those stories? Those are stories of trauma and of suffering, women forced to become mothers.

I met two doctors who performed abortions in Brazil. One of them in my town. He had a very busy clinic beside a famous local hospital. I went there around 10 years ago. I had a baby daughter, I couldn’t have another one. I got pregnant in the middle of a painful postpartum depression. I couldn’t even contemplate having that child. A friend’s sister had had an abortion there around a year before that.

The line was very long. There were people all around. Everyone was holding cash, can you believe it? At the time, I paid a lot of money, something like 5 minimum wages. There were some people in the line who were paying even more, I don’t know how the prices were calculated. The doctor had many assistants. I told him I respected his work a lot and that I found him brave. He remained quiet, almost looking down. I never understood his reaction.

The most impressing thing of this story is that I decided to tell my family. I told my siblings, who did not judge me and knew I was depressed. One day, I told my mother-in-law, she was very sad, she was very catholic. I never touched the subject again, but I have helped many women in need. Years later, I heard that the doctor who helped me was reported. He was not arrested, but he had to run away to another country. I keep thinking how wrong it is – I could have gotten worse, not have been able to take care of my daughter and of a new child
if it weren’t for him. Isn’t this enough to understand that he helped people?

My story is as brief as my memories of the abortion. I would like to introduce myself first, which may be the most different thing about my story. I am a humanized birth professional, I help other women go through a healthy, pleasant, happy labor and birth. I take care of pregnant women and the most important moment, which is the moment of childbirth. I am a humanized birth activist.

I am middle class and now I’m 51 years old. I had this abortion when I was 18, I got pregnant by a boyfriend, I was learning to deal with sexuality. I took every precaution, do you believe it? It was a terrible surprise, I didn’t want to be a mother at that point. Note that I say “at that point”, today I’m a mother of two and I love them both deeply. These are two different things — that moment and
maternity for me.

I found a clinic and a couple of doctors with my friends. I got the money, you can imagine how hard it was for me. And I went through the procedure, it was simple and fast. I took off of my shoulders the weight of a million pianos. Yes, not only one piano. I never thanked the doctors who executed it. They allowed me to be a mother at the right moment, to take care of other women who wanted to be mothers at the right time.

I’ll tell two stories. One is mine, the other is my sister’s. I was your student, but you won’t recognize me. And it’s fine, I trust you, I didn’t want to record this, just to write it. I hope you understand. I’ll tell two stories because I don’t believe in coincidences, and it all happened in a very similar way with me and with my sister.

I was still a student in college. At that time I was your student, and you never knew how much I wanted to talk to you. I started to date a boy, I didn’t know him well, and I got pregnant. We had no ties, I soon talked to him. I said I didn’t want to keep the pregnancy, he was offended and disappeared. I was already a civil servant at the time, I thought that my status would help me with the abortion. I knew nothing of this world.

At that time, I had this old friend of mine. He had studied with me at school and he had gotten accepted into the police academy. Before it started, while he waited, he was working at a drugstore. I told him everything, and he got the medicine. He asked me to go somewhere with him, a rented room, the following Saturday, and said that he would be there with me so I could use the medicine. So I went there, he said he got an injection. When I got there, I complained a lot, but he locked the door and told me he would only give me the injection if I had sex with him. He accused me of being alone, of having no one but him. He
said I was a woman without a man. He hit me, he forced sex, he even bit me. He applied the injection and it had no effect.

I left there and went out to look for the medicine some other way. I was able to do it on my own. I never had the courage to face this guy, I walked away from his family. In the end, I felt guilty or ashamed of everything, I can’t even explain it. Years later, my sister got pregnant by her boyfriend, she is five years younger than me. She was 19, and she went on her own to buy cytotec, and the guy who sold it promised to teach her how to use it. He made her have sex with him, he said they had to put the pill in his penis for it to work. For her, it
was very traumatic. She is a mother today, I never managed to keep a pregnancy until the end.

I told these two stories because I don’t believe in coincidences. I think not even my parents would believe in these stories of sexual violence, neither of them. Do you?

When I was married, my husband gave me a venereal disease, but the doctor didn’t tell me what it was. I was married, I got married at 17, I started dating him at 15. At 16, I had a baby, and I got a venereal disease at 17. The doctor didn’t say the name of the disease, but she said I was supposed to take some medicine. I took it, I injected it, she sent medicine for him to take too. She gave me a bag full of colorful condoms, I never forgot that.

I used to live far away, when I got home, when my mother, “look at condoms”, she already replied: “this is not a God’s thing, no! How are you going to use it? This is bad for your health. That can’t be used in a marriage!”. I just played with the condoms. I got pregnant again from the douchebag who is the father of my oldest daughter.

I broke up with him, started working as a prostitute, and before that I also got pregnant by other people, and then with prostitution it was one after another. There were so many abortions that one day I made a decision. I started buying condoms at the drug store on my own. We heard about AIDS, but at that time AIDS was more in São Paulo, a few cases in Rio de Janeiro. Here in our state there was no AIDS. I was only afraid of having sex with foreigners, because I thought it was an international disease.

Every time a ​gringo [a foreigner] came, I squeezed his parts to find out if there was any pus. That was how I knew if they had a venereal disease. But it wasn’t easy, customers didn’t want me anymore if I insisted on inspection. Then I tried to buy condoms at the drugstore, but the customers didn’t want to use them. They chose the other girls over me.

Now it’s my turn to tell the story. It has been a long time, I remember the [plant]
espinheira santa, I remember drinking this sort of beverage, garrafada. Last time I had an abortion was 20 years ago, my daughter is now 22. Whenever I had unprotected sex, bam, it happened; the guy came, I got pregnant. So I almost went crazy, my menstruation didn’t come, and the day after I was already looking for a solution.

Even before the menstruation, I used to have some tea right away. If the guy came inside me, I had some tea the day after. There were so many different kinds of tea that I don’t even remember their names. I used to buy cytotec too, it was already sold around here, I would take it, apply it with vaginal lotion and take it too.

Girl, it was a mess. I used to vomit and get really sick, but it’s part of our job.
Once, I had this medicine injected, it doesn’t even exist anymore, Maturon. Have you heard of it? It almost killed me. There was another abortion at a clinic, I don’t even remember the name of the place, it was clandestine. The woman just pulled it out raw. She even put a fan next to me so I wouldn’t feel sick. I got home bleeding. She sent me away and gave me some pieces of cloth; I put it between my legs and took a bus, right when she pulled it all out, raw. It was horrible.

I have been through a lot of stuff, you know? And this last time I didn’t even suffer that much, only after I got home, but then I could get some rest. But there was this one time, girl, when I took a tea that was so strong that it died inside me and I almost died too. When I got to the maternity hospital, they asked me “what happened?” and I answered “It was a dog, it startled me”. I came up with a lot of stuff, but they used to say “it was an abortion, you whore”. There were some nurses who told us “don’t say it was an abortion, because they will
treat you badly”. So we didn’t say it.

Can we tell our stories together? The four of us are here at my daughter’s. We always tell our abortion stories together, I was the one who helped with some of them. I’ll tell you mine, listen, please.

Mine was the one that ended with the birth of this daughter of mine. I went to a very old nurse here in town who used to do it with suction probes, do you remember that? I did, and I paid a lot of money. A whole salary at the time, many, many years ago, a salary, I do not remember how much was a salary at that time,we used another currency, I think. I had to prostitute myself every day, several times.

I went there, stood in line,when I arrived there were two people in front of me. I waited, the first one in, the second one in. My turn.Then one person who came after me in line, the third, came after me and said, “Let me go, I’m very nervous.” I said, “You can go before me, I’m nervous too.” After the girl went in, it was my turn. I went down the stairs.

The guy’s name was Araújo, I can say it, he has already died. I remember his name. I went downstairs with everything, I spent my whole salary, but I didn’t have the courage when I saw the place. There was something inside me, you know? The next morning, in the early morning, on the radio, I don’t remember which show, they were saying that an Araújo guy had killed a woman by abortion. There was that girl’s face in the papers, can you imagine?

I even started to feel guilty. “If I had gone there when it was my turn, I would be the one dead now.” And then i decided I no longer wanted to use the suction probe, still I had to have the abortion. The thing was to see if I could get the pills. We didn’t have citotec yet, we took any medicine. I took everything at once. I took clean permanganate, pure, took 3 pills and put them with one of those applicators in the vagina. You can’t imagine the pain I felt the day after that, my friend. A lot of pain here and there, then it started to come out.

That secretion came and went, I thought it was blood, but it wasn’t, it was me melting for permanganate. What I know, girl, to shorten the conversation, is that I had a wound on my cervix, besides the wound, the abortion did not happen. This is the girl, who is here in the conversation, my oldest daughter. I spent the whole pregnancy feeling pain, I was in pain all the time. She was born after 8 months, beautiful, clean, and I suffered the entire time during my pregnancy. The wound is still there, and the doctor said it was there because of the permanganate.

I have two stories to tell. None of them has a happy ending and, like thousands of women, these stories were buried deep down in my soul. They were waiting for a chance to emerge.

The first story happened at the end of the 1980s. I was young, women were taking the first steps towards a financial and personal independence. Little was said about AIDS and we were allowed to experience sexual freedom. I had a steady boyfriend in college and a relationship with a colleague. We were both committed to other people and lived this double life. We never put pressure on each other and we were in love. I was careful with my fertility calendar and there was this day when I said it was risky, but we couldn’t control ourselves. In
the bus, on my way home, I could only hope I didn’t get pregnant in that Russian roulette of a relationship. I was unlucky.

My misery began as soon as I confirmed the pregnancy. I was about to be a single mother, and I didn’t think it was fair for my boyfriend to take care of that child. My family would not accept this, I had a cousin going through a similar situation and she was judged a lot. I was three months pregnant when I decided to tell my boyfriend. He went crazy and got me an appointment in one week, with a doctor who had helped his father in similar situations.

In less than a week, I was at the surgery room, I had no time to think. I let him take the lead. I felt sick because of the medication I took after the abortion, so my mom ended up knowing about it. I could not read her reaction, if she was disappointed or relieved, all I know is that she acted like nothing had happened. I never judged her, we never even talked about it. My
relationship ended and I was getting more and more isolated in college. A long time after that I met another guy, who became my husband. I told him about what had happened only once; I don’t even know if he remembers it. We have been married for 26 years and we have 3 daughters.

And then comes my second story. Married, with 3 kids, it was all very intense. My husband has his own independent life, he is a high performance athlete, barely stays home and never took care of our girls. I always worked outside and came home to take care of the girls. He would come home to lie on the
couch. The contraceptive was not good for me, and he would not agree to have a vasectomy. That is when I got pregnant, he had agreed to control his ejaculation, but didn’t. When I confronted him, he just said “it’s the woman who has to take care of herself, not the man”.

We are a couple. I found myself pregnant again and all I could do was cry. I would wake up and go to bed crying. Until one day he came home with two pills. He never got up to care for a crying girl, never changed a diaper or fed them. He never went with me to any appointment. Once life became unbearable with my suffering and I knew what a fourth child meant, I took the medication, citotec. Two were not enough, so I had to take it again.

You might hear me and ask: why didn’t you operate earlier? Because I believed that he would have the vasectomy. Because after my third child, the doctor refused to do my tubal ligation saying he was against the operation. He said that I would become as fat as a castrated pig. Without him knowing it, I did the ligation.

I don’t regret being free, I don’t regret the decisions I made to solve my problems. I’m not proud of it all either, that’s different. I thank my ancestors, also the women who preceded me and who made way for me to have the strength to overcome what I went through. This is my story, which was in the drawer waiting for the right moment to come up.

My story began when I was 23 years old. Today I am 34 years old, but I would not like my name to appear, you know, I do not want to be exposed, because of my work and my family. Nobody knows. I had a boyfriend for some time, I went to college and lived with my mother, who was very conservative. She had never talked about sex with me. I depended on my father’s alimony.

I was always very attentive to my body and in the first week I realized that I was pregnant. Then I did a blood test and confirmed it. I was with my boyfriend at the time, who soon said the baby would be a beautiful child and that everything would be nice. I knew it was none of that. He was an irresponsible guy, he didn’t have a steady job, he didn’t study, how would he be responsible for another person? I wasn’t motivated to be a mother at that time either.

I remember crying a lot, desperately, because as much as I knew I hadn’t used condoms and that all this could happen, I didn’t believe the risk. Maybe that’s the case for many people, not just for me. I soon realized that I had to do something.

I had or, actually, I have a very conservative family. I had no one to lean on. In college, I had an older friend, you see, she was about my age today. I thought she was very old. She was more open-minded and she was a person I could talk to. She told me about the medication, citotec. I searched the Internet and discovered that it was sold illegally. I also discovered that it was sold at street markets.

My boyfriend at that time sold his cell phone to buy the 4 pills. I was told that I should take 2 and insert 2 in my vagina. There should be some time between the first and the second. We did it together. I went to his house so my mother would not know. He supported me a lot. He would have supported me if I had decided to keep it, but he respected my decision and took care of me. I was at most 15 days pregnant.

I felt a lot of cramping, but it was no different from intense menstruation cramps. Even the blood was the same, a little bit more coagulated. When everything fell, I had nothing left, I never went to a hospital for that. Once I had the courage, I told the gynecologist, had exams and everything was fine.

I do not regret it today. My story is common, as you can see. I couldn’t afford to have that child, but I had the privilege of having people who helped me, my friend and my ex boyfriend. That friend helped me do it, but also took care of me without judging me. I would not want to go through this again, I do not have children, nor do I plan to have them, but this is not a traumatic story for me. It is simply not a happy story to tell, or a story that I am proud of. This is the kind of story that we tell in very specific situations, like now. 

The story I am about to tell is very, very simple. It’s a story about the women
of my family: my mother helped me, I helped her, and my aunt helped us. I
had an abortion when I was 15, which was 30 years ago. I was at school and
had a sweetheart. It was a long relationship, but I did not know if we had a
future together.

My mother was a medical sonographer, a growing specialty in the country. As
soon as I suspected that I was pregnant, I spoke to her, who examined me and
confirmed it. We both looked for my aunt, who had had an abortion, and she
took us to a clinic in the city center. The place was relatively nice, it was in a
gallery, you went in and then you saw the office, as if it were a real doctor’s
clinic. We talked to the recepcionist and then to someone else. They asked us
how far along I was, I waited a little while and then did the procedure, with
anesthesia.

It was all very simple. Then I continued dating this boy and got pregnant
again. I can’t tell if it was a slip, it seemed like I actually wanted to become a
mother. Now I have a beautiful 29-year-old son and I no longer live with his
father. My aunt who helped us was my father’s sister and one of these days I
asked her if he ever knew. He never did. When I say that she helped us it is
because, years later, I went to that same clinic with my mother. Even being a
doctor, she also got pregnant unintentionally and decided to have an abortion.
I went there with her.

It was all between the women of the family. And, you know, I don’t know if I
had my son right after that because I was feeling guilty. I don’t know. All I
know is that I was happy with my son, and I had never talked about it. I had
never told anyone before, oddly enough. No one had ever asked anything and I
never wanted to talk about it in public. It was good to talk to you so I could
remember feelings and some of the things I experienced that I was no longer
consciously aware of. Thank you for listening.

“I am married, mother of four, I am 41 years old and when I got pregnant for the first time I was 18. It was from my boyfriend during my teen years. I remember that he got the money. The truth is that he stole the money from his sister to pay for the abortion. We looked for a clinic in our city. It was a clandestine clinic, of course, very small, tiny room. There were only two rooms. No, there were three.. There was one, where would enter, then procedure room and the other with three beds for recovery. At the time, imagine how much money this was. I paid R$600,00. It was a lot, a lot of money.

I was very afraid. Very scared. Crying nonstop. I remember sitting waiting for a little while, then I was called. I put on a hospital gown, then I was sedated. I didn’t see anything. When I woke up, I was already in the small {recovery] room] bed. It was really an ugly place, dirty even. I was only a few weeks along. Soon after I woke up, they told me to leave even though I was cramping. “You go home, place an ice bag to help with the cramps, and wait a few days until it they go away”.  They also gave me some medications, without prescription, just the pills.

I went to a friend’s house, my mother had no idea. I had a fever, took the pills. I returned to my mom’s and no one in my family found out. . When I was 19 or 20, I got pregnant again from the same boyfriend. Please, don’t judge me, but imagine a naive girl without any guidance. I didn’t talk about sex with my mother, I never heard anyone tell me “go to the doctor, use condoms, take birth control  I left that abortion to a pregnancy without any orientation. He is my oldest son. I didn’t have the courage to go through all that again. My boyfriend left me, and who helped me have this child, and pay the medical bills was my mother.”