The Means of Reproduction: Sex, Power, and the Future of the World (6 page)

Goaded in part by their own mutual antagonism, the two faiths are moving in a parallel direction toward ever greater social conservatism, as if to outdo each other in building bulwarks against the chaos of a changing world. In Nicaragua relations between Catholics and Protestants are strained enough that when the antiabortion movement planned a massive march in the capital in October 2006, the two groups started in different locations before converging on the National Assembly. Together, though, they mustered tens of thousands of people (one estimate suggested fifty thousand Catholics and twenty thousand Protestants)—an impressive show of force.
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Mantica was one of the organizers of that antiabortion march, and he said that working with evangelicals was “a little bit difficult because of the doctrinal differences.” Still, he added, “when it comes to defending life we saw that we had the exact same position, and we saw that it was possible to have a collaboration with them.”

Such cooperation portends a new kind of politics, with sexual conservatism creating fresh alliances and dividing moderates and modernizers from their more zealous, traditional brethren. “However unimaginable it may have appeared fifty years ago, not only is Christianity flourishing in the Third World, but so are distinctly Christian politics,” writes Philip Jenkins. “If in fact Christianity is going to be growing so sharply in numbers and cultural influence in coming decades, we can reasonably ask whether the faith will also provide the guiding political ideology of much of the world.”
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A belief in motherhood as a woman’s primary and highest calling is at the center of the kind of Christian politics that have emerged in Nicaragua. “In the feminist movement there is a weakness,” said Mantica. “If you read what they say, it’s like it’s a curse to be a mother, like it’s something that puts women at a disadvantage. The struggle of the feminist movement should be to participate in society, but as women.” At forty-three, Mantica is a relatively young man; he wears a black short-sleeve shirt with his clerical collar and has rimless glasses and salt-and-pepper hair. More than one woman told me with a sigh how attractive they found him. Sitting in his little fluorescent-lit office in the archbishop’s curia, he speaks kindly and thoughtfully, and it’s hard to tell how much he really understands about the actual implications of the abortion ban he worked so hard to pass. He insists that while all intentional abortions are illegal, medical interventions to save a woman’s life—even if they have the secondary effect of killing an embryo or fetus—are permitted. Thus, he suggests that there’s a kind of implicit exemption for doctors treating things like ectopic pregnancies. “There is no need for that term”—therapeutic abortion—“in order to preserve the lives of the mothers,” he said.

It’s tempting to think, then, that Mantica believes that the abortion ban doesn’t actually imperil women at all, that he hasn’t chosen to sacrifice mothers on the altar of motherhood. “This law comes to protect women,” he insisted. “Therapeutic abortion made women believe that having an abortion was right, but after they would have psychological problems, very big ones, and also moral problems. Many gynecologists are not being honest. They don’t say what the consequences of having an abortion are, what are the real risks, what are the side effects. In that sense, we think that the law is good for women.”

Some women think so, too. Twenty-nine-year-old Linda Gutierrez marched in the October pro-life demonstration. She’s a smart, articulate, single woman who speaks perfect English and vacations in New York City, where her sister works at the United Nations. Conservative but no prude, she has worked to raise awareness of HIV within the Catholic Church, holding seminars with priests and organizing HIV-awareness street fairs in each of Managua’s parishes. While the American religious right tends to exalt heterosexual marriage with the dreamy breathlessness of bridal magazines, Gutierrez is rather more cynical: She says that if she gets married, she’s going to assume that her husband, like most Nicaraguan men, will cheat on her. That way, if he doesn’t, she’ll be pleasantly surprised.

In recent years, she said, feminist groups had been trying to expand access to abortion by reading more into the therapeutic exemption than was intended, and the change in the law was meant simply to beat them back. “If a woman has cancer and they can’t have a baby,” she said, “obviously they need to have an abortion. I don’t think the church has a problem with that, because we’re saving a life.” She simply didn’t believe what most Nicaraguan doctors were saying about the ban’s implications. “There is a lot of misinformation from the gynecologists who talk to the press,” she said. “What I understood is that they were [saying] you can have an abortion in a free way, if I say or my gynecologist says. And the church said, ‘Not correct, you are confusing people.’

“Now there is a penalization, but it doesn’t mean they’re going to let people die. Obviously that was not our intention,” she said. Still, she believes that doctors shouldn’t necessarily put the life of a woman above that of her fetus. “They should do everything to save both lives. But if they can’t, they should save the mother. Or the other way around—if the mother has less probability to live and the baby has more, they’re going to save the baby, not the mother.”

As we spoke, the conversation kept coming back to what Gutierrez saw as a kind of moral chaos that’s descended on her country. The slide started, she said, when those who sought refuge in the United States during the Sandinista government returned after 1990, bringing American mores with them, and it’s been exacerbated by cable and the Internet. Much of Managua, a sprawling, centerless city, is comprised of tin-roofed shacks crammed together on unpaved lanes, but there are also parts that feel like Los Angeles or Miami, with American chain restaurants as well as hip open-air cafés and bars. Casinos, some featuring strippers, have proliferated since the Sandinistas’ 1990 defeat. (Managua is famous for its lack of street signs and marked addresses, and the names of gambling houses often serve as landmarks for taxi drivers.) The combination of widespread poverty with increasingly comfortable amenities for visitors with money has led to increasing sex tourism.
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It’s not hard to understand Gutierrez’s vertigo.

“I definitely think we have changed,” she said. “I just feel like there’s no order. That’s the only word I can find—there’s no order. We lost that sense of the way we Nicaraguan people do things. The society right now is in redefinition. This thing about abortion is a product of that.”

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f the abortion ban was partly a reaction to globalization, it’s now leading the country into a different kind of collision with the global order. Even before the ban was passed, a group of European, Canadian, and UN diplomats and development officials signed a letter to the president of the Nicaraguan Assembly reminding him of Nicaragua’s international obligations to women and asking the legislature to “consult, discuss, and reflect profoundly and thoroughly before making its final decision.” After it was signed into law, the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights sent a letter to Nicaragua’s minister of foreign affairs arguing that banning therapeutic abortion violated international law. The German government called on Ortega to reverse the ban. All this further hardened the position of conservatives, who denounced international organizations for meddling in the affairs of a sovereign state. One legislator fumed that foreign critics were “sexual libertines and criminals.”
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Such rhetoric is going to become more common, because Nicaragua could be charged with human rights violations before the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights. Created in 1959 by the Organization of American States, the commission investigates claims of human rights abuses in countries throughout the Western Hemisphere. Twenty-five countries, including Nicaragua, have ratified a 1969 treaty that recognizes its authority to hear complaints and “to take action on petitions and other communications pursuant to its authority.” Its interventions can make a big difference: In the case of Paulina Ramírez, the Mexican rape victim, both local and national human rights bodies in Mexico had recommended restitution, but the state of Baja California ignored them. It took the commission on human rights to get the government to compensate Ramírez for her ordeal and to compel an admission of wrongdoing.

Feminist attorneys didn’t have much chance of victory before Nicaragua’s Supreme Court, because the judges are all loyal to parties that supported the abortion ban. Thus their hope rests on international redress. “When I came here I said, ‘Don’t be too upset, because the fact that [the ban] was so badly done, so shameful, will only give us more arguments and more strength and more attention to push toward the other side,’ ” said Monica Roa, a Colombian lawyer who went to Nicaragua to help draft the challenge to the law.

A beautiful woman in her early thirties, with long black ringlets, Roa, a graduate of NYU law school, may be the closest thing the world of international reproductive rights law has to a superstar. She was only twenty-eight when, working with the Spanish feminist group Women’s Link Worldwide, she moved from New York City to her native Colombia to lead the charge against that country’s abortion ban. As the face of the pro-choice movement there, she was subject to numerous death threats. During the trial someone broke into her apartment—which then doubled as Women’s Link’s Colombian headquarters—and stole her computer and files, leaving everything else of value. “We had cash in pesos, cash in dollars. They were clearly going after just one thing,” she said. Roa’s NGO still gets suspicious calls from people claiming to be her friends and asking for her home address. When she’s in Colombia, the government provides her with full-time security.

Colombia’s abortion law remains far from permissive—the court ruled only that abortion had to be decriminalized in cases of rape, severe fetal malformation, or when the life or health of the mother was endangered. But conservative Catholics fought hard against these exemptions. At one point, the local affiliate of Human Life International submitted thirty thousand antiabortion children’s drawings—some by kids as young as three—as amicus briefs. Even with the 5 to 3 judicial victory, the fight is going to continue. “In the same way as it’s been happening in the U.S., as the composition of the court changes, they’ll try to push for more conservative judges,” Roa says. Colombian Supreme Court judges serve eight-year terms. One judge who voted to strike down the abortion ban has already stepped down and been replaced by a judge who supported it.

Nevertheless, the court’s ruling was an important victory, with implications for countries like Nicaragua. It affirmed that the vast body of international law is moving toward an understanding of reproductive rights as human rights. Besides various committees at the United Nations “you also have the European Court of Human Rights and the Inter-American system. They are all saying the same thing at the same time, and it sort of reinforces itself. The fact that we just did it at a national level in Colombia keeps reinforcing it,” said Roa.

These days Roa spends much of her life on the road. “I’ve been giving presentations all over—Argentina, Spain, Italy, Jordan, Ireland,” she said. Before Nicaragua she’d been collaborating with attorneys in Trinidad and Tobago. In Managua she worked on a laptop in the small back room of a local human rights center; above her hung a poster of a doll that said in Spanish, “All pregnant children have been raped. Therapeutic abortion is a right!”

“Most countries nowadays use the discourse of human rights, because that’s what is politically correct, and because you need to say those kinds of things to get the approval of the international community,” she said. “For example, the World Bank and the IMF include requirements to be respectful of human rights. Even if it’s just lip service, all [countries] say, at least on paper, that they respect human rights.” And by officially committing to human rights, countries create space for the kind of legal challenges Roa and her colleagues bring. “It opens up a big niche for all of us activists,” she said.

By the summer of 2007, though, Nicaragua’s feminist activists found themselves under attack, victims of their own high-stakes PR campaign. That August Rosa and her family reappeared in the news when María Esquivel, Rosa’s mother, filed a report accusing her husband of raping her daughter. The abuse, it emerged, had been going on for years. Rosa had gotten pregnant again not long after her abortion; by the time of her renewed notoriety she had a nineteen-month-old daughter. According to
El Nuevo Diario
it was an open secret in the neighborhood that the baby belonged to Francisco Fletes.
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Rosa’s stepfather fled, but he was quickly apprehended, and in November 2007 Fletes was tried for rape and sentenced to thirty years in prison. During the trial Rosa begged for the forgiveness of the man she’d accused in Costa Rica. Equivel insisted she’d been unaware of the abuse until that year—Rosa had claimed a classmate fathered her daughter—but the Ministry of the Family believed she’d long known about it and was considering bringing criminal charges against her.
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The women who’d helped Rosa’s family five years earlier were heartbroken by the revelations, and they now appeared under a cloud of complicity. The Red de Mujeres had stayed in touch with the family and had known about Rosa’s second pregnancy, though they said they had believed her when she said the father was a boy near her own age. Some abortion rights activists had even brought Fletes and Esquivel to Chile to advocate for liberalization there. With Fletes revealed as a rapist, the dismissal of suspicions about him suddenly seemed inexcusable, and the antiabortion movement went on the offensive.