Lisdany Rodríguez is not going to have an abortion.
It is the decision that she made from the Guajamal women's prison, and that her husband maintains from the El Yabú men's prison.
If everything goes well, if the Cuban political police do not make Lisdany abort, in nine months someone will be born who will not live with his parents, who are carrying out the punishment that those who demonstrate against the Government or those who sell beef.
When the police took Lisdany away after the protests on July 11, 2021, his partner, Luis Ernesto Jiménez, had been in prison for a few months for his black market business.
Lisdany noticed a few days ago that, after the last conjugal visit, she felt discomfort in her body and stopped having her period.
A first
test
was positive.
An ultrasound test confirmed that she was seven weeks and five days pregnant.
“I was surprised,” Lisdany, 25, said with her mother Bárbara Isaac Rojas, who visited her in Guajamal on Wednesday, January 31.
“I really didn't expect it.
She had been trying for many years and she had never succeeded.
And a child is a blessing from God, no matter the moment.”
The recluse pants barely close.
Lisdany has discomfort, a lot of vomiting.
The first cravings have begun to appear, sometimes she wants to eat ice cream, other times eat oranges, cravings that Barbara indulges as best she can.
She is happy.
Her biggest concern now is that State Security agents do not continue persuading her to have an abortion, as has been reported since her first examination.
If she aborts, she will have been forced, an abortion directly induced by politics.
The day they did the ultrasound, Dr. Frank, from the prison system, began the process for Lisdany to have an abortion, as if from the beginning he had assumed that it was a duty, one more order to follow.
“He started filling out papers for her to do tests and take out her belly without counting on her,” says Bárbara.
"But she didn't want to, she was crazy to get pregnant, she has been with the boy for nine years and she had never been pregnant."
Then they sent Lisdany to a psychologist, convinced that no one would want to give birth in a prison without medicine or food.
“She told me not to have it now, that she had eight years to complete and that there are no conditions,” says the young woman.
Of the 218 women who were detained during the 2021 protests in several Cuban provinces, Lisdany and her twin sister, Lidiany Rodríguez, are among those still in prison.
Both are sentenced to eight years in prison for the crimes of public disorder, contempt and attack.
If she carries her pregnancy to term, Lisdany would not be the first political prisoner of the mass protests in Cuba to give birth in the custody of the Cuban police.
Lucas was born a little over a year ago.
His mother, Lázara Karenia González, became pregnant during one of the conjugal visits and was then allowed to spend the first year of the child's life in house arrest.
Now the authorities want him to return to prison to finish his sentence of three years and six months of deprivation of liberty for the same crimes of public disorder, contempt and attack, after participating in the protests in Cárdenas, Matanzas.
“She is desperate,” says his sister Kirenia Suárez.
“She is afraid of having to leave the baby at such an emotional age in life.
He is traumatic.”
His lawyer presented a request for an extra-criminal license that was denied, and now they have filed an appeal.
Lucas will remain in the care of his grandmother when Lázara returns to prison.
If Lisdany gives birth at the end of this year, the baby will spend a first period in prison and then Bárbara will be in charge of taking care of him, as she has had to take care of another granddaughter, daughter Lidiany Rodríguez, for three years.
Nothing so far has convinced Lisdany to abort.
Neither the lack of food to feed the pregnant women in prison, nor the few medications to relieve her nausea, nor the threats from the political police.
If she aborts due to pressure from Cuban agents, they will have failed to comply with the law that says that in Cuba it is women who decide about her bodies.
“All the responsibility cannot fall on women”
The current Cuban Penal Code considers abortion that is performed without the consent of the surrogate as a crime.
Cuban women born after 1959 did so in a country where the right to abortion was not in dispute.
Two years after the triumph of the Revolution, abortion in Cuba was decriminalized, the first country in Latin America to do so.
In 1965, the legal basis that recognized it as a right was created.
Today, abortion is allowed in the institutions of the Ministry of Public Health by voluntary decision up to 12 weeks of gestational age, and up to 26 weeks due to fetal malformations incompatible with life.
Although abortion in Cuba is institutionalized and recognized as a right, activist Marta María Ramírez warns that it is only a ministerial provision, without the character of legislation.
“It seems sufficient, but since it does not have the character of legislation, it can be changed, brought to consultation, annulled by a Government, and we know the risk that entails,” she says.
Although it is true that Cuban women have not had to enter the regional debate against the prohibition of abortion, and although it is also a reality that the deaths of women who undergo these processes are minimal thanks to the fact that it is not a practice Illegal, abortion in Cuba also becomes a double-edged question: Is there awareness of risk?
Who has greater access to abortion?
Dr. Alexis René Girón González, a gynecologist with a specialty in Fetal Medicine, assures that, in theory, a woman can reach “the menstrual regulation consultation”—as abortion by manual uterine aspiration is called in Cuba—voluntarily. and request the service, “but if you don't have an acquaintance or some way to pay someone, and that someone ranges from the secretary to the doctor, you don't make it to the consultation.”
In a country with a completely collapsed health system and a notable loss of medical personnel, abortion services also become a matter of survival.
“There are very few conditions, they are made with old and reused materials, sometimes with very poor sterility conditions,” says Dr. Girón González.
“There are no optimal disposable materials, or at least for ordinary people, and, of course, both the doctor and the patient are exposed to a lot of health insecurity.
Added to that is the high rate of normalized obstetric violence in Cuba.”
The most used methods on the island for abortion are manual uterine aspiration, which is usually performed without anesthesia and in the early stages of pregnancy;
surgical abortion or curettage, and the use of misoprostol.
The Health Statistical Yearbook of the Ministry of Public Health for the year 2020 records that between 1980 and 2020 more than 3.9 million abortions were performed.
One of the criticisms surrounding abortion in Cuba is its practice as a contraceptive method due to the lack of resources and adequate sexual education that begins from childhood.
Today the lack of condoms in the country and their sale on the black market at altered prices is a reality.
Given the lack of protection and the consequent pregnancy, abortion is often resorted to.
Official sources indicate that 51,488 abortions were performed in Cuba in 2021.
“Assuming that abortion is a method or means for contraception is already a disastrous act,” says Dr. Girón González.
“It is very risky for the patient and the doctor.
It should not be a recurring practice, much less common, but in Cuba they do not give complete information to many patients, and when the information is biased, you cannot choose well.
In Cuba there are not even condoms, what could we expect from other methods?
Ramírez says that it is the State that has been failing to guarantee contraceptive methods for years, which is why there are women in Cuba who have had more than three abortions.
“All the responsibility cannot fall on the women, on the victims,” she insists.
“There is a responsibility in access, they have to let us access birth control methods.”
The National Fertility Survey published in 2022 shows that, between 2009 and 2022, abortions and menstrual regulations in Cuba increased by 14 percentage points.
According to the study, Cuban women have an average of 1.14 children, the lowest rate in the region.
The independent press has even recorded in recent times the abandonment of several children at an early age in garbage tanks or train lines.
Although the Government has tried to encourage the need to increase the birth rate in the country due to the increasingly increasing aging population, many are those who resist having children in a country marked today by the economic crisis and emigration as a possibility.
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