Setbacks

A few months ago I wondered what had happened throughout 2020 with unwanted pregnancies in Latin America.

Abortion is prohibited in much of the region.

With movement restrictions, strict confinements and more than 18 million women who were left without access to contraception during the quarantine, what did the Latin American women who wanted to abort?

Were there clandestine clinics with protocol ?;

Was parsley stalks used more than ever ?;

Thousands of unwanted children were born?

For some time I looked for numbers of a possible increase in maternal deaths in the region, but I did not find much, except for a UN report, in April, which estimated something like 15 million unwanted pregnancies in the world if the confinement It lasted a year (and warned that programs to eradicate female genital mutilation and child marriage would be delayed, with which in the next decade "2 million girls will be mutilated and 13 million minors will be forced to marry") .

On December 30, the law that guarantees safe abortion was approved in Argentina.

I received the news with sullen emotion: two years - and several lives - had been lost since the previous vote, when the law was rejected.

I thought of Dora Coledesky, Martha Rosenberg, Nelly Minyersky, Nina Brugo Marcó, among others.

Some died, others are over 80. In the photos they are seen standing, green scarf around their necks, convinced.

There are no images of when they were 40 or 50 years old, but even then they were going around the country talking about the need for a law to decriminalize abortion.

It was an impossible topic: at that time, people lowered their voices to say "condom" or "tampon".

So they insulted them and called them murderers.

But I think, above all, they did not pay attention to them.

I imagine that they did not know, when they started, that those breezes were going to trigger these storms (now they have begun to deal with the law in Chile, but there is still a long way to go: in countries like El Salvador, where since 1998 abortion is prohibited in all cases, they imprison women who have it and those who have spontaneous abortions;

this name: Cindy Erazo), but I envy them their determination.

They are called "the pioneers."

I would like to learn.

Because I'm tired.

I see the masks of an equity that I thought was solid falling like badly coagulated plaster.

The year that passed I spoke with writers, filmmakers, editors, philosophers, museum curators.

All in pairs with men, some with children (those have a worse time).

They felt they had regressed to the time of the caves: from confinement, childcare, house order, food, shopping, everything had fallen on them.

Before the pandemic they were professionals who worked 12 hours a day leading teams, traveling, spending many hours away from home.

At the beginning of the confinement, as if an underwater current had pushed them to the bottom, as if they had been a longed-for piece that was missing from a gluttonous puzzle, their boyfriends, partners, husbands assumed that ... what?

I do not know yet.

Neither do they.

The editors of scientific journals announced that the publications of female authors had decreased in 2020 by 50% compared to those made in 2019 and that, instead, men were publishing more.

The study

, from the Institute of High Social Studies in Argentina, revealed that 92.6% of women were in charge of accompanying their children's school activities during confinement.

Equity, gender equality: the retreat to domestic life has covered those words with ashes.

I want to exaggerate: I think of

;

at the beginning of

, Stephen King, "The terror, that would

not end for another 28 years if it is ended any time-, he began (...) with paper boat floating along the stream of a street flooded with rain".

You know what's next: the gutter, the clown, the blood-red yellow raincoat, the bone sprouting from the ripped arm.

Not all rights are legislated: many of us have taken them by storm.

Have we lost — are we about to lose — more than we think?