When Abortion Pills Were Banned in Brazil, Women Turned to Drug Traffickers

Xaiana bought black market misoprostol from a drug dealer and terminated a pregnancy.

After seven weeks, she went to a women’s clinic and admitted to having terminated a pregnancy. She was given a simple cauterization, and no one reported her. Today, black market misoprostol, brought in from India, Mexico and Argentina, is sold for anywhere from about $200 to $400 for the eight tablets recommended for an abortion, compared with less than $15 for a 60-pill bottle in the United States. It took a New York Times reporter less than one minute of asking to find someone willing to sell eight pills for $300, in a Rio neighborhood known for the sale of black market goods.

Cytotec is misoprostol, one-half of the World Health Organization’s recommended combination of hormones to carry out a medication abortion. Mifepristone has never been approved for use in Brazil, and women, unaware of the drug, do not seek it on the black market.

In 2006, the law prohibiting misoprostol distribution was strengthened to ban selling or publishing information about the drug on the internet. New guidelines issued by the Ministry of Health this month include the assertion that “inducing abortion by telemedicine, using drugs from the special control list, can cause irreversible damage to the woman.”

Other women have fallen into police traps. In 2012, a Rio sociologist decided she could not continue her pregnancy; she was already struggling to parent a 12-year-old with intense special needs. The sociologist went to her gynecologist. A year later, a letter arrived summoning her to the police. She thought it was about her car, which had been stolen the year before. But when she arrived, a male officer asked her, “Do you know what Cytotec is?”

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