TRAPPED IN BIRTH CYCLE
Venezuela’s decline turns personal SPOTLIGHT
The moment Johanna Guzman, 25, discovered she was going to have her sixth child, she began to sob, crushed by the idea of bringing another life into a nation in such decay. For years, as Venezuela spiralled deeper into an economic crisis, she and her husband had scoured clinics and pharmacies for any kind of birth control, usually in vain. They had a third child. A fourth. A fifth.
Already, Ms Guzman was cooking meagre dinners over a wood fire, washing clothing without soap, teaching lessons without paper. Already, she was stalked by a fear that she could not feed them all.
And now another child?
“I felt like I was drowning,” she said. As Venezuela enters its eighth year of economic crisis, a deeply personal drama is playing out inside the home: Millions of women are no longer able to find or afford birth control, pushing many into unplanned pregnancies at a time when they can barely feed the children they already have.
Around Caracas, the capital, a pack of three condoms costs US$4.40 (132 baht) — three times Venezuela’s monthly minimum wage of $1.50.
Birth control pills cost more than twice as much, roughly $11 a month, while an IUD, or intrauterine device, can cost more than $40 — more than 25 times the minimum wage. And that does not include a doctor’s fee to have the device put in.
With the cost of contraception so far out of reach, women are increasingly resorting to abortions, which are illegal and, in the worst cases, can cost them their lives.
The situation is a major departure from what Venezuela’s government once promised its women and girls. Hugo Chavez, the father of the country’s socialist-inspired revolution, declared that his government would grant women what others had not: full and equal participation in society.
Chavez brought women into the halls of power and enshrined in the constitution the right to “decide freely” how many children a couple wished to have. In a region where abortion is largely banned, he stopped short
of legalising the procedure. But birth control was subsidised and widely available.
Chavez and his successor, President Nicolas Maduro, publicly declared themselves to be feminists.
But as Mr Maduro’s grip on the country has hardened into authoritarian rule, Venezuela’s economy has collapsed under the weight of corruption, mismanagement and US sanctions.
The nation that was once Latin America’s wealthiest is mired in a crisis economists have called the world’s worst in decades, outside of war, with its population suffering from runaway inflation and widespread hunger.
And Venezuelans now face a health system so broken that it can no longer reliably provide basic contraception. Today, amid the collapse of the country’s public health system, birth control is nearly absent from government clinics and available at private pharmacies only at prohibitive prices.
The result has been life-changing for women, who shoulder the vast majority of child care responsibilities, just as the crisis has greatly expanded the challenge of being a parent.
Many women who grew up believing that Chavez’s political movement, known as Chavismo, would springboard them out of poverty, offering them education and career opportunities, now face the task of raising four, six or 10 children at a time when the basics of family care — food, soap, nappies — arrive intermittently or not at all.
Anitza Freitez, a demographer with the Universidad Catolica Andres Bello in Caracas, said this dynamic could shape the country for decades, creating “a vicious circle of poverty”.
As Venezuela’s maternity wards fell apart, maternal deaths surged 65% between 2015 and 2016, according to the country’s health ministry.
And then the government stopped releasing data.
Fexsibel Bracho was 24 and the mother of three when she sought out a clandestine clinic to end a pregnancy in January. The procedure, performed with a hook, punctured her uterus. She died of a haemorrhage on Feb 2.
“She didn’t have money for birth control,” said her mother, Lucibel Marcano, 51, who cared for Bracho in her final hours, watching her daughter’s face lose colour.
Representatives of the country’s health and women’s ministries did not respond to letters or emails requesting interviews.
When Chavez was elected president in 1998, he inherited a system in which birth control was already widely available.
As Venezuela’s economy — long buoyed by its vast oil reserves — began to tumble in 2014, the result of plummeting crude oil prices and poor financial management, the government’s purchasing power dove.
By 2015, contraceptives, once free at government hospitals and broadly affordable at private pharmacies, began to disappear. And women who could once plan their futures — thanks to contraception — began to lose control.
By 2018, oral contraceptives, implants and patches were nearly impossible to find in several major cities, according to a study by the reproductive rights coalition Equivalencies in Action.
Some couples began to ration or abstain from sex. Others tried to plan around a woman’s menstrual cycle. But it did not always work. And not everyone has a choice.
As the crisis has sharpened, many women say that abuse has, too, making it difficult for them to say no to a partner or to leave a relationship. As raising children in Venezuela has become increasingly difficult, the number of women seeking abortions has surged, according to interviews with health professionals and community workers across the country.
Before the economic crisis, some doctors would perform abortions illegally in safer facilities. But about half the country’s physicians, some 30,000 people, have left in recent years, according to the Venezuelan Medical Federation, driving women to makeshift clinics.
In the shadows, some women, and a few men, have become part of an expanding group of underground abortion counsellors, mostly trying to educate women in how to find and use misoprostol, a drug used legally in other countries to induce abortion.
The idea is to keep women away from shady abortion purveyors who charge high prices for possibly deadly operations.
Faldas-R, an activist group that runs an abortion support hotline, reported a 40% rise in calls between 2018 and 2019.
Women arrested for ending their pregnancies, and the practitioners who help them, can spend years in prison.
At great personal risk, a few counsellors meet women to deliver misoprostol.
But even with guidance, the experience can be excruciating, often involving a frantic search for the $150 it costs to buy the pills, followed by a hunt for a safe place to hide away to bleed for a few hours.
One night in late 2019, Jessika, 21, a university student, had an abortion in an auto parts warehouse, accompanied by two friends.
Jessika had never been able to afford birth control. She said she got pregnant after an assault by her boyfriend and knew she could not support a child.
“In the country we live in,” she said, “a woman is not afforded the luxury of one more mouth to feed.”
Through her contacts, she reached one of the counsellors, who gave her instructions and wished her luck.
Seven weeks pregnant, she bought misoprostol online from a man who called himself “Jose Vende Todo”, or “Jose Who Sells Everything”.
She knew her mother would not approve, and that she could not have the abortion at home. So she went to the warehouse, on loan from a friend, holing herself up in a white-walled office with a couch and a single window, keeping it closed so no one would hear her scream.
Some couples began to ration or abstain from sex. Others tried to plan around a woman’s menstrual cycle. But it did not always work. And not everyone has a choice.
She took the first two pills at 7pm and the second dose two hours later. Soon, she doubled over in pain and began to bleed profusely. Her legs shook, she cried out, and then she fainted.
Not all abortions with misoprostol are this painful or risky. Doctors recommend women take misoprostol with another drug, mifepristone, which prepares the body for the process, making the procedure easier.
But mifepristone is difficult to find in Venezuela, and so most women do it the hard way.
When Jessika came to, her friends urged her to go to the hospital.
“Don’t take me anywhere,” she said.
She was terrified of the police. Afterward, she spent weeks replaying the events of the night.
“You say to yourself, ‘Well, this happened, but it could have been worse. It could have gone differently. I could have died in the process, but I didn’t, and it’s OK,’” she said.
“But it’s not OK,” she went on.
“It’s not OK that I had to have an abortion in a warehouse. It’s not OK that I passed out, that I became depressed. It’s not OK that I feel the way I do,” she said, words tumbling out in anger. “It’s not OK that the country pushes you into this desperation, that all it does is close its doors to you. I am resilient, yes. But at some point, all of us get tired. And I am tired. I am so tired.”