Vanessa Jiménez Rubalcava and her wife, Sandra Cardona Alanís, co-founded an organization to get abortion pills to Mexicans who need them, which they run out of their home in Monterrey.
Vanessa Jiménez Rubalcava could spend all day responding to text messages. They come in at all hours, a torrent of questions from Americans translated into Spanish. The women and girls on the other end are all looking for the same thing: abortion pills.
On a quiet street in Monterrey, a sprawling city in northern Mexico, getting help from Ms. Jiménez Rubalcava and her wife, Sandra Cardona Alanís, is the only option for many women living north of the border who are desperate to terminate unwanted pregnancies.
The organization they founded in 2016, Necesito Abortar, provides mifepristone and misoprostol, medications commonly used to induce abortions. At first their clients were mainly Mexican women. But that began to change two years ago, when it became clear the U.S. Supreme Court was preparing to overturn Roe v. Wade, the landmark legal decision that had upheld abortion rights in the United States for nearly half a century.
Necesito Abortar is part of a vast network of Mexican activist groups that originally came into existence to provide abortion care and medication to women in Mexico, where abortion was criminalized federally until recently.
Now that Republican legislators in 14 U.S. states have passed laws that effectively ban abortion, these Mexican advocates find themselves in an odd position: Their American neighbours, whose abortion rights they once envied, are now the ones struggling to find safe ways of terminating pregnancies.
When Roe v. Wade was overturned in June, 2022, Necesito Abortar received 70 calls in a single day, a significant increase over the typical volume, Ms. Jiménez Rubalcava said. And the calls keep coming. The two women estimate that they help about 300 American women and girls a month access abortion care.
They move pills across the border using a network of volunteers. Once on the U.S. side, American volunteers ship the pills onward to those in need.
June 24, the second anniversary of the ruling that struck down Roe v. Wade, was a day of protest at the U.S. Supreme Court building in Washington.Anna Moneymaker/Getty Images
Although women in U.S. states where abortion is restricted can, in many cases, receive telehealth prescriptions for abortion medication from health care providers in other states, the continued availability of the pills in the U.S. is uncertain. The U.S. Supreme Court recently upheld access to mifepristone, but its decision did not rule out future legal challenges to the availability of abortion drugs. More than half of abortions in the U.S. in 2021 involved medication, according to the latest data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
Pills from Mexico can be easier to obtain. The advocates provide them for free and don’t require prescriptions. In the case of Necesito Abortar, the pills are funded by donors.
Women can also take the medication in their own homes, without having to travel out of state. “I think it’s unfair that, in order for somebody to have the right to do something, they have to cross borders,” Ms. Jiménez Rubalcava said.
Most of Necesito Abortar’s clients induce abortions at home, but Ms. Jiménez Rubalcava and Ms. Cardona Alanís have a room for those who cannot. They say it is used about twice a month.
She and Ms. Cardona Alanís run Necesito Abortar out of the home they share in Monterrey. They both have other careers. Ms. Cardona Alanís is a researcher, and Ms. Jiménez Rubalcava is a designer, but much of their time is spent helping women.
In addition to providing the abortion medication, the women and their organization’s volunteers guide women and girls through the process, explaining how to use the pills, and staying on the phone with them to offer their support.
The pills cause cramping and bleeding that is a normal part of the process, but it can be frightening to endure alone.
Since 2021, two major Supreme Court decisions in Mexico have led to abortion being decriminalized in the country, and to abortion care being provided by federal health services there.
But Maricruz Ocampo, a lawyer in the central Mexican state of Querétaro, explained that there is still a patchwork of restrictions on abortion in place in different Mexican states. For many Mexican women, activist organizations remain a crucial source for abortion care – and particularly because they guide women through the process, she said.
“It’s not just taking a pill in your bathroom and freaking out because you’re bleeding so much,” Ms. Ocampo said. “So this part of the network, that’s what makes it so valuable. They do the whole thing, not just send pills.”
Monterrey is the capital of Nuevo León, one of 31 states that comprise Mexico, along with the federal district of Mexico City. Reproductive laws vary from state to state, but as of 2021, abortion is not a federal crime.
Verónica Cruz Sánchez, a founder of another Mexican women’s organization called Las Libres, which is based in the city of Guanajuato, has helped women across the United States access abortion medication.
More than 20 years ago, and in the absence of any feminist organizations in her state at the time, she created Las Libres with a group of friends. At first, they focused their efforts on advocating for women who had been jailed for having abortions, until no women remained behind bars for that reason. The day Roe v. Wade was overturned, she said, the group received 100 messages from American women seeking help.
Like Ms. Jiménez Rubalcava, her phone and social-media channels have been inundated with requests. She said they average between 60 and 100 a day. Since January, 2022, Ms. Cruz Sánchez said her organization has helped about 30,000 people.
The group also still helps Mexican women, she said, who often stay in contact and send thank-you presents, such as candies.
The response from American women is markedly different.
“The women from the U.S., they don’t want to talk about what happened,” she said. “They just want to get it done.”