PORT-AU-PRINCE -- After one clinic failed to remove the 16-week-old fetus growing inside her, the desperate high school student turned to the “doctor” known to her only as Little Old Father, Ti Le Pè.
Standing in her sparse bedroom, the bearded man with a baseball cap first prepared a special bath — a mixture of Haitian moonshine, essential oil and a “special soap.” He then put her in bed, strapped her swollen stomach and disappeared. At 5 the next morning, he returned with a cold, murky herbal concoction.
The young woman, who had been secretly hiding her pregnancy, sipped the herbal remedy and waited for her contractions to finally expel the embryo.
After three days of vomiting, heavy bleeding and agonizing pain, she stumbled into a maternity hospital. Doctors rushed her into surgery where they stopped the bleeding, and repaired her perforated uterus, botched in the first abortion attempt.
“I thought everything would be OK,” said Marie, 20, her voice, like her emaciated body, devoid of strength a month into her two-month hospitalization. “If I knew things would end up like this, I wouldn’t have done it. I nearly died.”
Abortion is illegal in Haiti but women and girls are losing their uteruses and their lives as they turn to clandestine, increasingly deadly ways to terminate their pregnancies. These unsafe abortions are leading to a public health crisis in a region with one of the world’s highest rates of unintended pregnancies, experts say.
The long hidden crisis has started to emerge publicly as women’s groups, physicians and human rights advocates push for changes in Haiti’s strict ban on interrupting a pregnancy. The push comes as reports of rape and sexual violence increased after the devastating January 2010 earthquake, and as the country’s moribund economy and adolescent pregnancies make taboo practices such as abortion no longer unthinkable.
“A woman or girl who has decided she cannot keep a pregnancy will find a way, and will accept the health risks that go with an unsafe abortion,” said Catrin Schulte-Hillen, a reproductive health advisor with Médecins Sans Frontières/Doctors Without Borders (MSF) in Geneva, Switzerland. “There is a huge gap between the reality and legality of abortion. The price we pay ... is the lives of women.”
At MSF’s emergency maternity hospital in Delmas where Marie was admitted, women suffering post-abortion complications account for nearly 12 percent of the 560 pregnancy-related admissions the facility averages monthly, staff said. Access to safe abortion care for women is a serious medical-humanitarian issue, the aid group argues, especially in a country like Haiti where more women die from pregnancy-related causes than anywhere in the region.
“We know in countries where there has been a legalization or liberalization, as they call it in South Africa, of abortion on request, immediately they have seen an impact on maternal mortality,” Schulte-Hillen said. “And we know that in countries where the legal frame around abortion is restricted, maternal mortality related to unsafe abortion is the highest.”
When a 7.0 earthquake buckled the ground nearly four years ago, it unearthed many of this nation’s buried social ills. Tent cities exploded, and so did pregnancies. As Human Rights Watch and other groups documented the alarming “tent babies” crisis, doctors and nurses quietly noted the increased cases of incomplete abortions and premature bleeding by women, said Amanda Klasing of Human Rights Watch.
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