Elena Cauduro Perez was finishing high school in the summer of 2019 when she tested positive in a home pregnancy test. Her first hope was that a doctor in a hospital where her sister-in-law worked could perform an abortion. But rush hour traffic from her home in Cuernavaca to Mexico City took far longer than she and her boyfriend had expected, and they arrived too late.
Scrambling to find an alternative, she and her then-sister-in-law googled abortion clinics and identified “Interrupción Legal del Embarazo” (Legal Termination of Pregnancy), a clinic that offered to terminate her pregnancy for less than two thousand pesos (around 100 dollars) and could perform the procedure that same day.
Elena had a bad feeling about the clinic after talking to someone there over the phone, but there didn’t seem to be any other options that fell within their budget so they headed over to the address at Bahía Magdalena 161. It looked like a normal house from the outside with a steel door and three windows facing the street. Next to the bell, a sign with a logo said DeSide ILE, (it now says, “Woman Attention Program ILE”), with a telephone number and a website to schedule appointments. ILE, in Spanish, means Legal Termination of Pregnancy , which suggests to any woman wanting an abortion that this would be a place providing the procedure. As Elena would find out that day, this was deeply misleading.
The female clinician who opened the door made Elena’s then sister-in-law and boyfriend stay in the waiting room while she walked Elena through a corridor to a tiny room where she performed an ultrasound.
She told Elena she was five-weeks pregnant and handed her a silicone prototype of a five-week fetus . She told Elena that she had already had a human being inside her, and she was going to kill him if she had that abortion.
“First, I thought it was normal that she would try to convince me not to have an abortion, but it got too extreme,” Elena recounted in a recent interview.
The woman went on to play a video and left the room. A graphic scene of an abortion being performed filled with screen, blood gushing and the body parts of the fetus strewn around.
Elena closed her eyes, but she could still hear the narrator describing the procedure, focusing on the fetus's body parts as dramatic music played in the background. Panic-stricken and feeling faint, Elena burst out of the room.
She found the clinician in the waiting room where she had been asking her boyfriend if he loved Elena. Elena found herself being led back to the consulting room where the clinician announced that her boyfriend did not, in fact, love her and was likely to abandon her if she had the abortion. If she terminated her pregnancy, the clinician said, there were many possible dangers, including dying.
When Elena still said that she wanted to have the abortion, the clinician told her that they had run out of abortion pills. Elena grabbed her purse and left.
This is a story about the huge obstacles women face when trying to have abortions in Mexico, even in states where it’s free and legal. An organized network of Catholic-lead clinics called Centro de Ayuda para la Mujer Latinoamericana (CAM), that operates in a gray area of legality, misleads women, spreading fear, emotional blackmail and medical misinformation. Some of the women, having healed from the emotional trauma, are now fighting back.
CAM didn’t respond to any request for comment via multiple phone calls, emails and WhatsApp messages.
In the past, CAM has been funded, in part, by the Mexican government under a very different guise. At the Federal Registration System for Civil Society Organizations, which has a database of all the organizations that have received funding by the government, CAM is registered as an organization whose activity is, “the promotion and contribution of services for health and sanitary services.” There is no mention of its religiosity or its anti-abortion focus.
Founded in 1989, CAM has now 70 locations in Mexico and 130 in other 20 countries in Central America, Latin America, and the Caribbean, according to its website. It is also based in the United States and in Spain.
Abortion in the country of Mexico is only legal if the pregnancy is a result of rape. The Federal Penal Code allows pregnancy termination if the woman’s life is at risk. The two exceptions are in Mexico City and Oaxaca where abortion is permitted under any circumstance before the 12th week of pregnancy.
Mexico City has 13 public clinics and hospitals (due to COVID only nine are providing the service), and around 70 private clinics that provide abortions. And it is these public clinics that are the main target of CAM’s work in Mexico City.
CAM has mobile and fixed locations in Mexico City, but these aren’t always presented as CAM. Sometimes CAM names it’s locations DeSide, Decide-ILE and Woman Attention Program ILE, which are misleading names for women trying to get an abortion. DeSide stands for the words “Decide” and “Si” (which is yes in Spanish). ILE is an acronym for Legal Termination of Pregnancy in Spanish.The public and private clinics that provide abortions are commonly known as “Clinicas ILE”.
Every morning, a van, bus, trailer with the logo CAM or DeSide, parks outside six of the public clinics and offer free ultrasounds to women who are waiting in line outside. CAM activities are focused on the private clinics, although another organization called 40 Days of Prayers stands outside 17 private clinics, organizes vigils and prayers, hand out flyers to women and connect them to CAM.
Early this year, I went to all of the clinics to retrace the steps of Elena and other women I interviewed for this story. I saw the CAM staff approach the women as they stepped out of their taxis or got in line. They introduced themselves as, “members of ILE (the clinics that provide abortion), the information part”. They offered information and free ultrasounds, even though both services are provided inside the public clinics where the women were intending to go.
The CAM staff members strategy seems to be to talk non-stop, not giving the women any room to say whether they were interested or not. They just told the women to follow them to the truck and leave their companions outside.
At two of the clinics, they told the women in line for the public clinics that they would keep their spots while they went inside the CAM vans to get an ultrasound. But the staff didn’t hold the women’s places in liney don’t, and they lost their spots, and with that, sometimes the chance to receive an abortion that day because the public clinics only perform a limited number of abortions each day. At some public clinics, such as Beatriz Velasco, they treat up to 15 women every day, but at other clinics such as Cuatepec, only serve four.
Raul Piña, a pastor who works for CAM, stands outside one of the public clinics every morning from 5 am to 8 am handing out flyers to the women in line and inviting them inside the van parked close to the clinic’s entrance.
He told me that every morning he and the CAM team count how many women go inside the clinic, how many are sent back because they don’t have the required documents or showed up late, and how many return the next day. They don’t approach the women who visit the clinic for a second time, because they are likely to reject the information if they have already received it. He says that some women and their companions get defensive, and he and his team try to avoid confrontation.
“If you tell them you’re pro-life, it’s even worse. We have to be more open and calm about it and choose the right words so they don’t feel offended,” he told me, while he was drinking coffee during his break.The conversation with Piña started when I was reporting outside one of the clinics. I later let him know that I was a journalist working on this story.
Piña said he doesn’t bring religion when he talks to women unless they mention it first.
“We’re pro-life, but respect their decision. We give them information and they can decide. That is our role,” Piña said. He played for me on his cell phone, the video his coworkers show women once inside the van. The images and the narration were very similar to what Alejandrina and Elena described.
The two vans parked outside the clinic are white and pink and have a photo of a woman with a worried expression looking at a pregnancy test. At the top, the van says, “Legal Termination of Pregnancy,” promising absolute discretion, free ultrasound, and immediate help. On the door and in front read the text, “DeSíde ILE”.
Piña said they make the vans look as they was part of the clinics that provide abortions to get women attention. “We disguise it as if it were ILE, because otherwise, they wouldn’t listen to us”, he mentioned.
He says that less than 10 percent of the women who visit the clinic decide to continue their pregnancies. But if he and his coworkers can convince even one of them to do so, it’s worth the effort, he said.
The government tries to warn women not to go into the CAM locations, but their efforts aren’t effective. Outside most of the clinics, there’s a sign on the wall that reads, “The modules outside this institution don’t belong to the Health Department. Any information related to the termination of pregnancy is inside this hospital.” At two public clinics, Hospital Materno Infantil Tláhuac and Iguarán, the sign is across the door, but CAM counselors approach the women before they have a chance to enter the clinic and read the sign.
The Frequently Asked Questions section of the landing website for Legal Termination of Pregnancy by the Secretary of Health has a warning in bold text that reads, “In both clinics and hospitals, be sure to deal directly with authorized personnel, within the facility. Ignore anyone outside. "
Piña, the pastor, said police officers at the entrance of the clinic have asked him not to approach the women. But because he and his coworkers are approaching women on the street, the police can’t stop them, he said.
The police zeal to protect women from CAM workers seems to vary from public clinic to public clinic. At Hospital Materno Infantil Cuautepec, the police told us that there was a CAM outdoor office, but they didn’t let them stay. On the contrary, when I visited the Tlahuac public clinic, the police officer I approached directed me to talk to the CAM counselor, saying she would give me the same information as the public clinic.
The communications officer from Mexico City’s Health Department said that they are aware of the CAM vans outside the clinics since these have been there for a long time. However, since they are on the street, and have denied presenting themselves as hospital workers, the Health Department hasn’t been able to do more. “Fortunately, these groups don’t have an impact on women, since they are properly informed inside the clinic, and they are free to make any decision,” said the Communication Officer.
CAM trailer outside the Dr. Juan Duque de Estrada Health Center
CAM truck outside Beatriz Velasco Health Center Clinic
CAM van parked outside Hospital Materno Infantil Inguarán
CAM van parked outside Mexico-España Health Center
CAM van near Hospital Materno Infantil Tlahuac
CAM information stand outside Hospital Materno Infantil Tlahuac
For the opening of new locations and daily operation operations CAM has received funding from different sources: donations from private donors and two US-based organizations.
Human Life International, a non-profit based in Front Royal Virginia, self-defined as a “global pro-life apostolate, with an active network in nearly 100 countries’, reported on its yearly Tax Form that in 2016 it donated $5,180 to CAM or training, consultation, and support of common affiliates. It donated $5,145 in 2015, and $7,490 in 2013.
Heartbeat International, a nonprofit “Christian association of faith-based pregnancy”, based in Columbus Ohio, reported on its Tax Form yearly tax form between 2013 and 2020, that it has a joint affiliation with CAM, and directs funds for training, consultation and support of common affiliates, although didn’t share the amount. Neither Human Life International nor Heartbeat answered a request for comment.
The funding received from these organizations is a small part of CAM’s total income. According to the Tax Administration Service, a Mexican government agency, CAM received more than 27 million pesos or 1.4 million dollars in donations in 2020 from private donors.
In the past, CAM received funding from two departments of the government of Mexico, In 2011 received 200,000 pesos or $10,000 in funding from the Social Development Department (Sedesol) for projects meant to benefit people in poverty or vulnerability. In 2010, the organization received 90,000 pesos, or $4,500 dollars, from the Mexican Institute of Youth to support youth programs.
In the ’90s, advertisements for the CAM facilities first appeared on painted fences and in newspapers. They were everywhere, “so common, that we didn’t even cut them and save them”, said Salvador Fausto, a journalist who in 2008 published together with Temoris Greko a book called “The speaker of God,”a book about the former director of CAM Eduardo Sierra Limón.
As Fausto recalls, the advertisements offered various pregnancy-related services. Sometimes the organization would present itself as Catholic but at other times there were no religious overtones. They offered free ultrasounds or to support women during their pregnancy.
In May 2007, when abortion became legal in Mexico City, CAM started a program called Operation Rescue, inspired by the American anti-abortion organization with the same name. Members of the organization started showing up at the hospitals that performed abortions trying to lure patients to their locations and convince them not to have abortions, Limon, the former president of CAM, told Frausto in an interview for his book.
Starting in 2011, CAM’s efforts to attract women expanded in the digital realm.
Now, there are at least six websites, Decide-ILE, DeSíde, Aborto Seguro CDMX, Interrumpir Embarazo, Interrupción del Embarazo, ILE Virtual, that appear to be sponsored by CAM, offering free consultation and various services. The text on the websites is misleading, however, promising, “legal and safe abortion,” saying the decision is, “your choice,” even as it discourages the use of abortion pills or natural remedies.
At first blush, the six websites look like they belong to six different clinics. But all of them have the same phone and WhatsApp number for scheduling appointments. When I messaged this number, the person attending to the line asked me where I was located and gave the addresses of several of the other CAM locations in Mexico City. On its Facebook page, the clinic Decide ILE gives its location as Bahia de la Magdalena 161, which is the address of the clinic Elena went to.
The clinic Aborto Seguro Mexico says on its Facebook page that it is located on the two streets Bahia de la Concepcion and Bahía Magdalena. The house at the corner of these two streets is Bahía de la Concepcion 25. This is the same address displayed on CAM’s website.
CAM also uses Facebook pages as a strategy to reach women seeking an abortion in Mexico City as well as states where abortion is not yet legal. Aborto Seguro CDMX’s page describes the clinic as, “Your best alternative if you decide to terminate your pregnancy and you live in Mexico City. Affordable quality service.”
The Facebook page called "Miso.lucion" offers companionship to women who decide to take abortion pills. The cover photo is a drawing of three women hugging with the words, “girls support girls.” But the address and the telephone number displayed are the same as the Aborto Seguro CDMX and other CAM pages.
The Facebook page entitled, “I’m pregnant but I don’t want it,” offers to counsel women in Hermosillo, Sonora, It also offers “freedom of choice, solutions, safe abortion and necessary abortion”. The page has a link to DeSide, and a local WhatsApp number that directs women to a clinic called CAM Viñedos in the City of Hermosillo.
Carmen, who wanted to only use her second name in this story to protect her privacy, had a positive pregnancy test in December of 2019.
She knew that didn’t want to continue her pregnancy, but didn’t know who to ask for help. She also knew that if she told her deeply Catholic family, they would force her to keep the baby.
She lives in Sonora, one of the states with severe prison sentences of up to 6 years of imprisonment for having an abortion. Between 2007 and 2016, 11 women and 7 men were put ontrial on abortion related charges, which makes Sonora the fourth highest state in number of trials on this matter, according to the report from the Information Group on Reproductive Choice (GIRE) non-profit.
Carmen’s first instinct was to look on Facebook groups. As she was scrolling down, she found that a friend shared a post from a Facebook page called, “I’m pregnant and I don’t want it.” A couple of her friends who she knew favored abortion rights had liked the page, she said, “that’s why I thought it was trustworthy.”
Carmen called the telephone number on the Facebook page and scheduled an appointment three weeks later.
When she arrived at the location in Hermosillo, Sonora, she was surprised that it looked like a house, dark red on the outside with a grid and a courtyard. An older woman with gray hair and glasses opened the door, let her in and left her boyfriend waiting outside at the courtyard.
The woman asked her to fill out a form with her personal information and gave her a flyer about abortion where she immediately spotted some spelling mistakes.
Carmen remembers that the clinic looked dark, the furniture, and the equipment looked old. Inside the room, there was a stretcher, a desk, and a chair. Right on the back, there was an ultrasound machine, so old that it looked like a microwave, Carmen remembers.
After performing the ultrasound, the woman let her boyfriend enter the consulting room. He said that she accused him of forcing Carmen into having the abortion. They remember the woman then pulling out a dark case with plastic fetuses and went on to show them three pictures that she said represented their options: a baby born, a baby given up for adoption, and a fetus destroyed.
“I stopped paying attention and turned around to see Carmen who was very quiet and looked scared. I don’t know what had happened, what she had said to her. I told Carmen: it’s time to go. I asked the women categorically: Are you gonna help us or not?” described Carmen’s boyfriend.
The woman told them, Carmen and her boyfriend recall, that they were going to go to jail if police found out that they had had an abortion. Carmen said that made her really nervous because she had given the woman information about where she lived.
When Carmen insisted she didn’t want to continue the pregnancy, the woman told her she would first need to visit a gynecologist who would give her a reduced price. The woman called the gynecologist who agreed to see her right away.
Carmen said the gynecologist told her she was against abortion and try to convince her to keep the baby. And so, she and her boyfriend realized that they had to look for other options.
In July 2015, Alejandrina Rodríguez Morales was 21 and an undergrad at Universidad Autónoma Metropolitana in Mexico City when she found out she was pregnant. She was certain that she wanted to have an abortion and headed to the public clinic, Pediatric Maternal Hospital in Xochimilco, the closest to her home and school.
She arrived by herself at the clinic at 6 a.m. and was the first one in line. Her boyfriend at the time was going to join her later. A worker at the clinic gave the first 15 women in line a token and allowed them to go inside until 8:00 a.m. Alejandrina remembers seeing many women outside who didn’t receive a token, and were asked to return the next day.
But once inside the clinic, Alejandrina was among several women who had to leave because they didn’t have all of the documentation she needed.
Her proof of residency didn’t match her other ID, which had the address of the first house she had moved into in Mexico City three years earlier. She left the clinic, sat outside, and wept.
“I was super vulnerable. I was alone, I had been there since the morning. It had been emotionally a lot,” said Alejandrina.
The bureaucratic obstacles to accessing abortion through the government system make woman vulnerable to the approaches of the CAM staff.
The Health Department's website doesn't list the specific documents required at each clinic, it doesn't specify either which clinics are not providing abortion services due to the pandemic.
She recalls that an old lady with a kind face approached her and offered a tissue paper. She told her that she could help. She told Alejandrina that she first needed to do an ultrasound and she could do it inside a van parked right in front. Unbeknownst to Alejandrina, she was entering a clinic run by CAM that tries its best to stop women from having abortions.
Inside the van, the woman asked her Alejandrina if she knew what an abortion was. “No, what you know about it isn’t the truth, let me show you a video,” Alejandrina recalls the woman saying.
Then, from a black case, the woman pulled out a fetus made out of silicon and asked her to hold it. If she had an abortion, she would be at risk of dying or becoming infertile, the woman told her, Alejandrina said.
In fact, not a single woman who has had an abortion a public clinic in Mexico City has died, according to data from the Health Department of Mexico City. Between 2007,when termination of pregnancy became legal, and 2020 more than 230,000 abortions have been performed at public clinics in Mexico City.
Alejandrina said that the woman suggested she deliver the baby and put it up for adoption with families in the United States who would cover medical expenses.
The woman played a video that ended with the words “Mother Mary.”That was when Alejandrina understood that she was in the wrong place.
She told the woman that she needed to go buy a Coca-Cola because she was about to faint.
Alejandrina’s ex-boyfriend who lived at the other end of the city, arrived when Alejandrina had stepped out of the van.
“When we met, she was crying and then she told me everything that had happened,” he told me in an interview. “As time went by, she told me that what made the whole thing worse was she had to go through all that by herself, alone,” he said.
After their experience at the establishments run by CAM, Alejandrina and Elena turned to private clinics for help.
Alejandrina, through a friend, found a feminist non-profit clinic where she had an abortion with pills, a couple of weeks later. Alejandrina, now 27, holds a master’s degree in public policy, works as a freelance consultant, hosts a podcast with her best friend, and has a dog shelter with her mom and her sister.
Elena went to Centro Médico Mujer, which she had found first on Google but initially ruled out because it was too expensive. She called a friend to transfer money to her, and paid for an abortion that day. Elena is now a 20-year-old sophomore studying International Relations at Universidad de las Americas, Puebla. She lives with her family in Cuernavaca, Morelos, where she takes her classes online.
Both women said they received kind and supportive care at the private clinics, both from the attendants but also from other women in the waiting room to have abortions the same day.
Still, soon after the experience, Elena began having panic attacks. She told her mom, who took her to therapy. Elena said that the therapy helped her heal and made her able to start talking about what had happened.
Carmen also had an abortion a few weeks later, but her experience was more complicated because abortion is illegal in her state. First, she took an abortion pill she had bought online but got nervous when she started bleeding perfusely. So she decided to go to a hospital and pretend she had had a miscarriage.
Carmen is currently studying her undergrad program at Universidad de Sonora, she also prepares vegan nuggets to sell on-demand and video streams on Twitch twice a week to receive an extra income.
In February 2020, one month after she had visited CAM’s clinic, Carmen revisited the Facebook page “I’m pregnant and I don’t want it.” She saw that its followers had almost doubled. She got so angry that she decided to create her own Facebook page to provide women with accurate information about abortion.
She created a group called #ProAborto that now has nearly 2,000 members. In this group, women share information about their abortion experience and alert others about places such as the one Carmen visited. “Beware of this website which is anti-abortion, and will take you to pro-life clinics,” reads one of the posts the members added. “Tips to take care of yourself after having an abortion,” reads another.
On this same page, she created a mentor-mentee program where women can sign up to offer or receive psychological, medical or emotional support.
At first, the group was public, but as it kept growing, she made it private and added a questionnaire to try to identify anti-abortion activists infiltratinge the group.
Soon she shared her experience with other members, she said, “because I was the administrator and I knew it was very private.”
“Good night, beautiful ladies. I’m no longer afraid and I want to share my story with you,” she began. In the same post, Carmen asked the women to help her report the Facebook page “I’m pregnant but I don’t want to”, so Facebook would take it down.
A year after she had an abortion, Elena googled the name of the first clinic she went to. Under the reviews, she found other testimonies of people who had the same experience as she did.
At the same time, in August 2020, the court in the state of Veracruz, voted against the legalization of abortion. Elena decided that given the national attention given to the topic, it was her perfect opportunity to share her story with everyone.
“My objective was to reach as many women as possible, so they all have all this information and save themselves from a horrible experience,” Elena said.
She told her story on Twitter thread, beginning, “I will not give any explanations why I took this decision, I won’t give any excuse either. Read it in case you need it or someone close to you does”.
Her tweet had more than 40,000 shares and responses. Other women recognized the clinic and said they had been there too.
Elena created a WhatsApp group with 12 women who had had abortions and reached out to her to talk about their experiences. The group met on Zoom every Saturday at noon. For two hours each week, the women would share their stories, and listen. “It was all about talking amongst people that understand you, feeling liberated and realizing that you were not wrong,” she said. Elena decided to close the group four months later when everyone in the group felt they had healed.
When I met Elena in person earlier this year, she was texting with a 16-year old who had just had an abortion and had reached out to her a month earlier for help when she was making her decision. I asked Elena if she ever felt overwhelmed by other people’s stories. She said that listening to other stories made her want to help, but she never felt negatively impacted.
“After I created the group, I felt really good,” she told me. “I felt that my mistakes and bad experiences were worth it because I got something good out of it.”