200 pregnant women due to defective contraceptives and it is not a scandal

Container of contraceptive pills with pills for one month. Uly Martín

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I remember that I found out about the Chilean women who got pregnant from using faulty contraceptives through

.

I lived in Washington and, although I checked the American press daily, it was very rare for them to publish something about my country: "A failure in contraceptive pills could have caused dozens of pregnancies in Chile."

I was surprised by the content, and I looked for more information.

2021 was just beginning and the pandemic dominated the public agenda.

I found very little in the local media.

The issue was simply not being treated as a major scandal.

A couple of months ago I returned to Chile and came across the news of a bill that seeks to grant greater responsibilities to laboratories when a woman becomes pregnant due to a defective contraceptive.

I wondered what would become of the victims in that case.

There were no longer dozens, as when the news broke, but more than 200. They received the pills in public health centers;

most were poor.

Women lacking quality sex education and without the tools to stand trial against Andrómaco and Silesia, the laboratories that manufactured contraceptives.

Thanks to the Miles Corporation, which provides legal advice to those affected by considering that they were victims of a violation of sexual and reproductive rights, the laboratories compensated them financially, although the amount is confidential.

To this day, the state has done nothing for them.

The corporation is preparing a lawsuit so that the State repairs those affected, an action that the UN itself encouraged at the beginning of the year.

How do you repair a woman who, despite continuing with the methods to prevent pregnancy, was forced to have a child?

The damage is not the child, as a conservative sector has interpreted about legal actions.

The damage is to the freedom of women.

And, in this case, poor women.

During the Government of Sebastián Piñera, the corporation unsuccessfully tried to reach a reparation agreement with the State, but the latter rejected the minimum negotiation condition: create a standardized protocol that obliges health centers to record the batch number of the pills that are delivered to each user, generate content on “steps to follow” in the event of an illegal denial of a voluntary interruption of pregnancy, publish it on the web pages of the centers, and provide free mental health care to those affected.

In Chile, the interruption of pregnancy is only decriminalized when the life of the mother is in danger, due to fetal inviability and rape.

Melanie Riffo, one of those affected, now 22 years old and the mother of a one-year-old and three-month-old boy, told me on the phone last week that she started searching the internet for ways to have an abortion.

She felt unable to take care of another person.

She found a treatment for $75, which, in addition to being out of her budget, did not give her confidence.

She is still waiting for someone from the State to contact her.

That she offer him psychological help, financial support for parenting, something.

The issue continues without being treated for what it is: a scandal.

At the end of May, President Gabriel Boric apologized on behalf of the Chilean state to Francisca, a woman with HIV who was subjected to sterilization without her consent when she had a child in November 2002 in a public hospital.

The victim of violation of sexual and reproductive rights had to wait 20 years for the State to ask her for forgiveness.

I hope that the 200 affected women do not have to wait so long.

These are our recommended articles of the week:

And some suggestions to finish:

🎧 A podcast and an artist: Womansplaining and Nadia Granados.

By Sally Palomino

Colombian writer Gloria Susana Esquivel is the host and producer of this space in which gender is discussed from different perspectives of society and culture.

It is difficult to recommend a single chapter because the podcast has existed since 2018 and there have been many topics that have been addressed, but taking advantage of the fact that one of its guests, Nadia Granados, has just won the Luis Caballero Award, I leave here the link of the chapter in the that talks about

, an artistic project about the violence caused by the political elite.

Nadia Granados is a Colombian performance, experimental film,

and cabaret artist, internationally recognized as

.

The important Colombian culture award that she has just received considers her "one of the most prominent figures in the Latin American post-porn performance scene."

The exhibition for which she was awarded talks about the relationship between advertising, war and masculinity.

She talks about her work in this chapter of Womansplaining.

✨🌈

The Mexican collective Disidenta organizes this second edition on 'Community of social practice and feminist knowledge'.

The workshop proposes the use of art as a tool to point out the effect that violence has on bodies, but also to propose possible solutions from art in a theoretical and practical way.

"Breaking everything begins by breaking how we think," they say from the project that begins on August 1.

Among its promoters are the artists and activists Cerrucha, Lorena Wolffer and María Laura Rosa, who have already participated in the creation of MUTUA, an Experimental Community of Art and Feminist Knowledge.

From Monday to Wednesday from 6:00 p.m. to 8:30 p.m.

You can download the complete program here: https://www.disidenta.com/info-programa-arte-feminismo.

Contact email: disidenta.contacto@gmail.com