"Hadas de la Pildora" by BJ Taylor

            Anita Diaz, paralegal at Dan Newsome’s law offices in Alpine, Texas, knew when she heard her cellphone buzz that the news would not be good.

            “Bueno?” Anita answered.

            “Hadas de la pildora?” A young woman’s voice asked if she was talking with the “pill fairy.”

            Anita looked around at her office. Dan Newsome was in court for the morning. She was alone. “Yes, just a moment,” Anita said in Spanish. She stood and walked to the law office door. She locked it and returned to her desk.

            “Okay, how can I help you?” Anita asked.

            “My pregnancy test is positive. I can’t have any more children. I’ve already got two and I can barely make it financially. I work as cook at the Love Ranch facility, and they will fire me if I’m pregnant.”  A crash of pottery or glassware shattering stopped the conversation.

            “Can you get to a room that is private?” Anita asked. “It needs to be a place where you feel less anxious.”

            “Yes,” the woman said, falling silent for several moments. “I’m in my bedroom now with the door locked,” she continued. “We can talk. My children are at school this morning, and the Love Ranch people don’t usually bother me until just before noon.”

            “I need to ask some questions. About how many weeks along are you?”

            “I missed my last two periods and am beginning to feel like I’m pregnant. I know how it feels from my last two children. I’d say I’m about eight weeks into the pregnancy.”

            Anita signed with relief. More than likely, she’d be able to help. Mifepristone was effective up to ten weeks of pregnancy.

            “You did well to let us know now, instead of later,” Anita said. “Do you have a partera? She needs to be someone you trust.”

            “La partera who delivered my last child has retired and now lives with her daughter in Fort Stockton.  Don’t tell me that I should keep this child.” Anita’s caller began to panic again.

            “Calm, mija. I’m just asking standard questions. Please don’t worry. Now, other than missing your periods, do you have any other unusual symptoms? Like spotting blood? Or running a fever?”

            “No, I’m feeling normal except for that off feeling pregnancy gives me.”

            “Have you terminated a pregnancy before with either surgery or medicine?”

            “No, never.”

            “Do you have someone who can do your job for a couple of days while you recover?”

            “I think I can get one of my older nieces to fill in for me.”

            “Good. Ideally no one should know about your condition.  This is important so our network is not compromised.”

            “Yes, I understand. I can be trusted.”

            “We prefer to be known as acompañantes. ‘Pill fairy’ has too many weird meanings. Where can I deliver your medicine?”

            “Can you meet me at the Ranch, any weekday between nine and eleven-thirty a.m.?  I’m at the Alpine/Terlingua station of the Love Ranch.  There is only the ranching operation at this site. Basically, it’s just a bunch of ranch workers and kitchen helpers at the Alpine/Terlingua station.”

            “I can text you when one of us can arrange to see you. It will happen this week.  Do you have questions?”

            “No.”

            “Your acompañante will be either Anita or Dolores. Try not to worry.  Bueno.”

            Anita sighed and went into the office kitchen to make fresh coffee. On her way, she unlocked the office door.  She wondered how many more women like her caller had similar problems, but without access to any help. She knew the stories about how, in the U.S., during her grandmother’s time, American women only got access to reproductive rights starting in the 1970s. The twenty-first century produced access to mifepristone and misoprostol, which had been used safely and effectively for decades. But access to these lifesaving medicines was banned now in most states.    The Supremes decision from prior months started the death knell for women’s rights in the U.S.  Anita’s beloved legal system had failed to uphold this basic right of all women.

            Anita laughed. What else could she do, when her vocation of the law in this country began a striptease of all women’s rights? Fortunately, Anita and her abuela knew where to turn for help. For a few decades Mexican women enjoyed an unambiguous constitutional right to reproductive health care. Mexico became the lifeline for women’s health along the border, by introducing the model called acompanamiento. Some would compare this model to the “Jane” network of the late 1960s in the U.S., when women formed a network of information and helpers to provide safe abortions.

            Unlike the “Jane” network, tied to universities and upper-class American women, the acompanamiento delivered a standard of care primarily to those who had fallen through the cracks—or chasms—in the medical systems in Texas. Outreach was to poor women who were stripped of access to healthcare with the draconian abolishment of Planned Parenthood and other local clinics. An affluent woman in Texas could fly to another state or nation for a safe termination of pregnancy. Those women were few. The real urgency centered with poor women.  Anita and her associates along the border shattered these economic differences with a network of women who become acompañante. It began in the heart of Mexico and reached deep into the heart of Texas.

            Long before the idea of nationhood developed in la frontera, women looked to the itinerant midwife, for delivery of medical services developed by the brujas or wise women along the borderland. These women understood both modern and herbal remedies for women and their children; and they remained a treasured source of knowledge along the border.

            Anita picked up her cellphone and dialed her grandmother, Dolores Montoya, a midwife in Presidio.

            “Abuela,” said Anita, “we have a new patient.”

BJ Taylor is a Texas native doomed to wander the borderlands between Texas and Mexico. BJ was born with a severe case of cultural schizophrenia common to those who grow up in the borderlands between nations, languages, and cultures.