The Means of Reproduction: Sex, Power, and the Future of the World (5 page)

The sensational story of the pregnant nine-year-old soon hit the newspapers. That’s how it came to the attention of a group of Nicaraguan feminists called Red de Mujeres Contra la Violencia, or the Network of Women Against Violence. A delegation of Nicaraguan activists, including Violeta Delgado Sarmiento and Marta María Blandón, head of the national branch of Ipas, traveled to Costa Rica, and by chance they met Esquivel and Fletes at the Nicaraguan embassy there. The couple had decided they wanted their daughter to have an abortion and were looking for help getting her out of the country. Dismissing suspicions about Fletes as unfounded prejudice against a poor and uneducated man, the Nicaraguan feminists became the family’s champions.

As the case grew more politicized, with priests speaking out about Rosa during church services, officials tried to ensure that the pregnancy was brought to term. “We witnessed the highest authorities of the National Child Welfare Agency tell Rosita and her parents that they had been blessed by God, that what had happened was a blessing from heaven and they had to accept it, and that surely this baby was going to be someone very important, because it could be no random chance that Rosita had been chosen to experience the magnificent event of motherhood at such a young age,” said Blandon.
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Rosa was in the hospital for nearly a month before the feminists succeeded in getting her released to the hotel where her parents were staying. Even then the Costa Rican office for children said they were going to block the family from leaving the country.
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The girl and her mother had to sneak away in the middle of the night, driving with the women from Red de Mujeres and leaving all their meager possessions in Costa Rica.

In Nicaragua the situation was no less heated. By the time they got to Managua, Rosa was three and a half months pregnant. It also emerged, said Blandón, that she had two untreated venereal diseases. With the help of their advocates, Rosa’s parents petitioned the Ministry of Health for a therapeutic abortion. Legally, the approval of three doctors was required, but Health Minister Lucia Salvo, a close ally of the Catholic hierarchy, appointed a sixteen-person committee instead, and put Rafael Cabrera in charge of it.

For Cabrera, Rosa’s age made little difference. Speaking in
Rosita,
a 2005 documentary about the case, he said, “A nine-year-old child is perfectly able to have a normal pregnancy. Proof of this—another baby was born to a nine-year-old girl in El Salvador. If we follow history, in 1939 in Peru, a five-year-old child had a baby.”
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Eventually, attorneys and activists working with Rosa’s mother and stepfather were able to force the government to have her evaluated by three doctors instead of sixteen. But the doctors essentially punted. They waited until midnight to release their recommendation, and they said that Rosa’s life would be equally endangered by giving birth or undergoing a late-term abortion. Following their determination, the Nicaraguan minister of the family announced that she wanted to remove Rosa from her parents’ custody to prevent them from terminating the pregnancy.

For some in the government it was all about abortion, but for others it was more complicated. Throughout the entire ordeal, Carmen Largaespada, vice minister of the family (and a pro-choice feminist), was in contact with the Costa Rican minister of children’s affairs. Her Costa Rican colleague told her that police there believed Fletes had impregnated Rosa. “They have a very strong and powerful children’s protection system in Costa Rica,” Largaespada said. She took their charges seriously. “That’s quite common in Nicaragua—stepparents abusing their stepdaughters,” she said. Largaespada blamed the NGOs for using Rosa to score political points, and insisted that, given all the time that had elapsed, an abortion would have been risky.

Nevertheless, once again Rosa and her mother decided to run in the middle of the night. The women from Red de Mujeres put the girl in a wheelchair and, with the help of a sympathetic nurse, snuck her out a back door. They were planning to take her to another hospital that had agreed to perform the abortion, but a journalist warned them that all hospitals had been ordered to detain Rosa if she showed up.

In the end, three gynecologists, all of whom insisted on remaining anonymous, performed the abortion in the home of one of Sarmiento and Blandón’s colleagues. “The abortion was done in the same condition as the majority of abortions in this country—in a house,” said Sarmiento. “The difference was, this was done by three of the best ob-gyns in Nicaragua.”

The local media trumpeted the news of the abortion, and public opinion was firmly on the side of Rosa and her parents. There was an investigation, but it never went anywhere, and a few weeks after the abortion, the health minister resigned over the case.

The outcome left the Catholic Church outraged, and Nicaraguan cardinal Miguel Obando y Bravo announced the excommunication of Rosa’s parents, the doctors who performed her abortion, and everyone who had helped them. It was a symbolic gesture, since unilateral excommunication was beyond the cardinal’s authority, but his denunciation had the support of the hierarchy. Cardinal Alfonso Lopez Trujillo, president of the Vatican’s Pontifical Council for the Family, told the BBC, “I am writing to the cardinal personally to express to him in all sincerity my support, because public opinion was quite confused with regard to that case. It did not spare a thought to defending the rights of unborn babies who are people who have a right to live.”
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In response to this a feminist group in Spain presented a Vatican representative with a petition saying, “I also want to be excommunicated for collaborating in the interruption of the pregnancy and the saving of Rosa’s life.” There were over twenty-six thousand signatures.

R
osa would, for a time, disappear from the national scene, but the passions her ordeal stirred up still affect the country’s politics. “They felt offended by the Rosa case and how it was resolved,” Altamirano said of the antiabortion movement. For his part, Cabrera accused feminist groups of “kidnapping” Rosa. “The girl was taken out of the hospital by the back door, and twenty-four hours later they communicated that the night before she had an abortion in a private clinic,” he said. “It originated a debate about whether the article of the law was being appropriately applied.”

As the debate heated up, Daniel Ortega was getting religion. Since losing power in 1990, the Sandinista leader had made two failed runs for the presidency, and in 2006 circumstances were finally aligning in his favor. Through a power-sharing deal he’d struck with conservative president Arnoldo Alemán in 1999, the share of the vote necessary to win the election had been reduced from 45 percent to 35 percent. Shedding his past guerrilla trappings, Ortega ran on a platform of peace and reconciliation. He chose a former Contra leader as his running mate, and though traditional black and red Sandinista flags still festooned many barrios, his official campaign posters were a distinctly nonmartial bright pink. Perhaps most significant, he embraced the church, attending mass regularly and filling his speeches with talk of God. In 2005, he married the poet Rosario Murillo, his longtime
compañera,
in a church wedding. Cardinal Obando y Bravo presided.

With the conservative opposition divided between two candidates, Ortega’s support of the abortion ban probably helped him get enough of the religious vote to push him over the top in the election. His stance disgusted Nicaraguan feminists, most of them former Sandinista militants, but it didn’t surprise them. Women had played a major role in the revolution—some estimates say 30 percent of the combatants were female
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—but they were shunted aside once the Sandinistas took over the government in 1979. In her memoir,
The Country Under My Skin,
Gioconda Belli, one of the most famous and mediagenic of the female Sandinistas, recalls how, not long after the uprising that brought the group to power, top army officials led by Ortega’s brother, Humberto, “decided that from that point on women would only occupy administrative posts.”
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A little later Belli writes of encountering Murillo with Daniel Ortega in Cuba: “Rosario, who had always been such a strong woman, was now timid and frightened, a bag of nerves . . . following Daniel around like a faceless, sad little shadow.”
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Women did make some crucial gains under the Sandinistas: The government replaced the sole legal authority men had enjoyed over their families with equal rights for mothers and fathers, and it ended discrimination against “illegitimate” children. Abortion laws weren’t reformed, but they also weren’t much enforced. Yet many Sandinista feminists felt marginalized and dismissed. “The priority was to win elections, not on women’s problems,” said former Sandinista Klemen Altamirano, the cofounder of a women’s center in Masaya, a city near Managua. In 1987, Altamirano was part of a group of Sandinistas who drafted a declaration on sexual rights—including the decriminalization of abortion and access to contraception and sex education—that was presented to Ortega by hundreds of party women. According to Altamirano, the president told them to forget about it, “because we have to replace the fifty thousand martyrs of the revolution.”

Still, until the Sandinistas were defeated by Violeta Chamorro in 1990, Nicaragua’s feminists mostly worked within the party. Afterward, though, they developed an autonomous movement and put much of their energy into opening feminist health clinics like the one Klemen Altamirano runs. They offered birth control and sex education, and a few may have quietly performed abortions. This coincided with the growing emphasis on reproductive rights among American and European donors, and the clinics attracted significant international aid. Outside support was a mixed blessing. “Because of the reliance on external funding to support the clinics, there was the impression among some women activists that the women’s movement was owned by the international development agencies,” wrote Katherine Isbester, a scholar of Nicaraguan feminism.
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The clinics made a tempting target for populist demagoguery, and President Arnoldo Alemán, who succeeded Chamorro, fixated on them. He denounced them for corruption, accused several feminist NGOs of performing illegal abortions, and had his administration launch punitive, time-consuming audits. “In the campaign against the NGOs, Alemán united the church and state on one side, while he and his allies conflated foreigners and feminists on the other side,” wrote the scholar Karen Kampwirth.
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He even tried to pass a law banning Nicaraguan NGOs from requesting foreign funds without government permission.

The rift between the feminist movement and the Sandinistas grew further in 1998 when Ortega’s stepdaughter, Zoilamérica Narváez, accused him of sexually abusing her as a child. Murillo, her mother, dismissed her as a “slut,”
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but many leading Sandinista women took her side. “The woman’s movement was with Zoilamérica,” said Klemen Altamirano, “and the Sandinista movement looked for refuge in the church.”

A
nd not just in the Catholic Church. The newly pious Ortega, with his talk of making “spiritual revolution,” also found support among Nicaragua’s exponentially expanding population of
evangélicos.
In just the last three decades, the number of Nicaraguan evangelicals has exploded, from around 5 percent of the population to somewhere between 20 percent and 30 percent, and commentators estimated that as many as a third of them supported Ortega. As their numbers have grown, so has their political clout. “Evangelicals in Nicaragua were once overlooked as outcasts,” the
Christian Science Monitor
reported before the election. “Now no political contender can afford to alienate them.”
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Ortega no doubt knew that when, a few months before the vote, he signed a declaration written by evangelical leaders that called therapeutic abortion “a pretext to legalize all abortions.”
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In fierce competition for souls and stature, Nicaragua’s Catholics and Protestants have yet to form anything like the united political front that’s emerged in the United States. In 1992, Pope John Paul II compared Latin American evangelicals to “ravenous wolves” preying on the Catholic flock. Shortly after Nicaragua’s abortion ban was passed, I went to a Sunday service at Hosanna, a U.S.-style megachurch in Managua, where the pastor spent most of the sermon railing against two things: sexual sin and the spiritual stasis of Nicaraguan Catholicism. “I know as you know that religion in Nicaragua for the last 514 years has been indulgent and permissive and flexible,” he said. “It has been a conceptual faith in God, with nothing of practice, nothing of daily exercise.... People say, ‘I believe in God, I believe in Mary, I believe in the saints, but I live in my own way.’ This has been the traditional way to live religion in Nicaragua.”

Yet even as they criticized each other, leaders of the two faiths have remarkably similar critiques of the religious laxity and moral decay they see in their country. “We see the world is changing, the values are changing,” said Monsignor Miguel Mantica, the spokesman for the archdiocese of Managua. “There’s a process of secularization, where people are losing their religious values, their family values.” He continued: “There’s a new way of religiosity. I would call it lite religion—like Pepsi Lite. You choose from the market [for] your religious needs, and maybe try to avoid what requires more commitment. That would be one of the explanations why people are flocking toward these different sects.” By sects he means Pentecostal churches. “Our work is to attend to people’s religious needs but without compromising the commitments of the gospel,” he said.