Global Women's Voices: Share Personal Stories

Lucila, Argentina

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Mónica Ojeda is dead. Mónica Ojeda died and nobody put an obituary in the newspaper. Who cares about Mónica Ojeda, who arrived at the hospital with a four-day-old infection that they couldn’t stop. Mónica Ojeda who committed the stupidity of getting an abortion from the local butcher, who later disappeared from the neighborhood. Mónica Ojeda, who before she died, had the might to declare that she had done it on her own behalf, that nobody in her family knew about it, and who that way managed to get her husband, who had been jailed, set free.

Didn’t you know Mónica, that abortion is a crime and a mortal sin? That children are a blessing from God and if you already had five, you could just as well have had six. That because of that and for that you all are the proletariat? That any doctor can explain to you (no, in the hospital, no: you have to pay for quality care), that very effective contraceptive procedures exist? And that yes, in the case of one of those accidents from which no one is exempt, if one ends up pregnant, one can get an abortion with the best doctor in the best clinic with all the guarantees of anteseptic.

Really, Mónica, you were very ignorant. And even so you had the gumption, a few months ago, to go to school. At your age? What were you trying to do? Progess in life? Ascend socio-economically? Capacitate yourself to better educate your children? But God punished your act of wisdom: work at home had to be done and you had to leave school.

It’s just that you were too pretentious, Mónica. You didn’t accept the virtue of resignation. Like when you would get angry because your husband accused you of being unfaithful. What else did you want? Hadn’t you had a daughter with another man before you were with him? Yes, I know that he also had had a daughter with someone else. But it’s not the same. Boys will be boys.

And what about your latest idea to leave him if he didn’t give you money for the children? Couldn’t it be because you spent too much? Or maybe because he feared his money would go to that girl who wasn’t his daughter who lived with your mother. But you, Mónica insisted in saving part of what you earned to buy wood and build yourself a little shack.

With the miserable amount you earned! You were practically stealing bread from the mouths of your children, Mónica. And on top of that you wanted to separate them from their father and condemn them to live in a little wooden shack when your father was a carpenter. God also punished you for that, Mónica.

I don’t know why I’m talking to you like this. I always treated you more formally. Because we were never friends. How could we have been? You were so young, I am an old woman. You only went to elementary school, I was a professor in the University. You had to clean my house in Martinez and I never visited your shack in Maquinista Savio. You looked so pretty in the clothes that I didn’t want anymore and I felt so generous when I gave them to you. Or when I sent your children books and magazines that I didn’t need. Or notebooks and pencils that I wasn’t going to use because (didn’t you know) nowadays notes are kept on disquettes.

Mónica Ojeda, with first and last name, much more than a number or a statistic, you truly committed a crime and a mortal crime: you were born poor.

-Diario La Nación
Campaign for an Interamerican Convention of Sexual and Reproductive Rights

updated: 7/2/2004