By Rodrigo Díaz Guerrero, José María Moreno, y Bernardo Moreno
A very relevant topic today is the U.S. supreme court’s decision to overturn Roe v. Wade: from now on, abortion is no longer a right protected under the Constitution—as it had been since 1973–and is now, again, a matter to be decided at the state level. This supposes that half of the U.S. states will effectively and completely ban abortion. For many, this marks a dark night that will sink us into obscurity, a return to patriarchal forms of control that the vast majority thought had been long forgotten. If science has always been a machista affair, developing birth control methods exclusively for women, considering the physical and mental toll this implies; if modern society grew at the mercy of men´s privileges, making women responsible for childbearing and education; then the law now follows this same millenary and retrograde tendency: women´s autonomy over their body is a thing of the past, they are now responsible to take their pregnancy to the end, even against their will. Let us now review a few illustrations and consequences of unwanted or forced pregnancies.
Mirror Ball, Neil Young, 1995
As we all know, a pregnancy does not always take place in the most ideal context. Many times, it takes place in settings far away from romanticized versions of love and happiness. Such is the story that Neil Young, one of the greatest icons in rock and roll history, relates in some of the tracks of this album that sold over a million and a half copies around the world. This earned him a gold record in the U.S. and silver record in the U.K. Hardly is this a surprise, considering that the accompaniment band was all Pearl Jam members, who were at the height of their grunge powers. On top of this, the great Brendan O’Brien was in charge of production—and all of the songs except two of them were recorded in four days straight. An album filled with distorted guitars, a powerful drumbeat, and the typical Neil Young political lyrics regarding this week’s topic, as in “Act of Love”: “You know I’ll always help you baby. But I just can’t do that. I know I said I’d help you baby. Here’s my wallet. Call me sometime.”
“4 Months, 3 Weeks, and 2 Days,” Cristian Mungiu, 2007
This Romanian film, which won the Palme d´Or, tells a story in a simple and anti-melodramatic fashion: two friends in Soviet Romania during a time in which abortion was illegal. Găbita and Otilia, two college students, are in need of a clandestine abortion for Găbita. When they finally reach the man who will procure the abortion for them, we discover that Găbita lied and is not in her second month, but rather the fourth. The plot thickens, considerably. Like in a lucid nightmare counting time backwards, towards the end, Găbita is in her fourth month, facing possible murder charges if she carries on with the abortion; three weeks, Găbita receives the unlabeled medicine from a perfect bastard, two days, the aborted fetus must be thrown away down a garbage chute. And there’s no more time: Otilia tells Găbita that they will never talk about this incident as Găbita stares blankly into her friend’s face.
“Ladydi,” Jennifer Clement, 2014
Jennifer Clement, American-Mexican author, and since 2015 first president of PEN International, currently lives in San Miguel de Allende. “Ladydi” is a profound novel about the reality that women must face in rural Mexico, in the hills of some community in the state of Guerrero, where there are no men because they all have migrated to the U.S. in search of something better, leaving wives and daughters behind. A community in which the best thing that could happen to you, as a girl, is to be ugly so that you don’t get kidnapped any random day by men who come to town in their trucks holding their big guns. Better to cut their hair so that these girls look like boys; keep a dug-out hole in the back in case these men come so that the girls can get inside it, cover it with dirt, and leave them there until you can hear the trucks driving away. That is the reality that Ladydi García Martínez must endure as protagonist in this novel. A magnificent story about love and desperation. Clement sustains everything that she relates in this crude novel that very recently was adapted for the big screen, entitled “Prayers for the Stolen.”
