Abortion Conversations, Part 2: “A lot of people wanted to talk.”
An interview with Lucía Berro Pizzarossa, creator of Contá Conmigo
By Abby Minor
This is the second post in ACP’s 2021 blog series featuring conversations with recent grant partners. We started this series, which is written and facilitated by ACP Board Member Abby Minor, in order to highlight some of the many questions, tensions, and insights that animate the complex work of destigmatizing abortion. We also launched this series for the simple reason that here at ACP, we’re always up for abortion conversations! If you are, too, please join the conversation in the Comments below.
“At the beginning, I was very firm in saying that abortion is health care, a medical process, a service/access issue. And while it is, I now think that abortions are also moments and events in people’s lives, in a life that has many rich chapters. So it’s part of your health but also intersects with your plans, dreams, ambitions, love life.”
Who gets to tell abortion stories in public? And how do those stories shape the ways a society understands and defines abortions and people who have them? When Uruguayan lawyer Lucía Berro Pizzarossa started to research the debate on legalizing abortion in her country, she found that the images presented by members of parliament were based on stereotypes that had little to do with women’s lived experiences. “These people were speaking about me and people I love,” Lucía told me. “I do not know these people they speak of. People I know have very complex experiences that have nothing to do with the way these parliamentarians portray people who have abortions.”
So Lucía decided to start a project that would encourage women to tell their abortion stories on their own terms and change how the country of Uruguay thinks about people who have abortions. I had the pleasure of talking with Lucía earlier this year, when we met over Zoom to discuss Contá Conmigo, the storytelling project she launched in 2019 with the support of an ACP seed grant. “Contá Conmigo has a double meaning,” she explained, “in Spanish, the word ‘contar’ means to tell (a story) and also to count on somebody. So in this project women tell their stories and also support each other.”
Before asking Lucía how the project unfolded—and how it weathered a global pandemic—I wanted to learn more about the thinking that led her to it. While working on her PhD research, she told me, she experienced multiple positions: “I was a researcher and also a subject of the law,” she noted. Once she finished her PhD, Lucía wanted to move from its central argument—that “the people the lawmakers speak about are not real people, but stereotyped and charged ideas”—to the logical next question: “okay, so what do the people who actually have abortions look like, how do they speak?”
In asking this question, Lucía noted that it’s not just conservative lawmakers who stigmatize abortion. “What was painful was, it came from both sides. So even the ideas used to advance supposedly liberal laws—like, women need access to abortion if they’ve been raped, or because they’re unable to care for existing children—not all of us go through abortions as dramatic or even exceptional experiences.” She wanted to make sure that Contá Conmigo could be a space for sharing “stories that are very real, sad, happy,” even mundane.
Lucía’s original plan was to facilitate storytelling and book club circles where just such real, sad, and happy stories could be shared. “The idea was that I would be in Uruguay and facilitate storytelling and sharing. I would kick it off maybe with one of my stories, and see where that conversation takes us.” She left the Netherlands, where she’d done her PhD, and headed home to Uruguay at the beginning of 2020 with the intention of spending the year there to lead the conversations in person. But once the Covid-19 pandemic changed things, she and her collaborators had to recalculate. “We tried virtual meetings,” she said, “but only a few people showed up.” So they moved everything online, creating a digital space with social media in which people can tell their stories and also support each other—not the medium at first envisioned, but with similar effects.
I asked Lucía what the response was like. “It was incredible,” she told me, “as soon as the first story came out people were sending more and more stories. And a lot of the comments were like, ‘I never have found a space like this.’ A lot of people wanted to talk. People could send in writing, a voice note; they really wanted to talk to us and have that affirming moment of someone saying ‘thank you for sharing. That was brave.’ A lot of very difficult but very beautiful moments.”
“Sometimes when we want to break the stigma we fall into the trap of unidimensional thinking—like abortion is either really happy and empowering or really sad and difficult. But we have to create space to fight stigma at the same time that it can be difficult.”
“We had an initial plan of compiling the stories,” Lucía told me, “but not necessarily like this—the booklet came about because we wanted something to share given that we couldn’t meet in person.” The Contá Conmigo booklet, available in digital and print form, features 45 stories so far, each accompanied by bold, colorful illustrations. I asked Lucía how she connected with illustrator Mika P. “I was a huge fan of their work—so when we were putting the booklet together we said why don’t we get them to illustrate it? We talked about what it meant to them to read those stories, what abortion means for gender norms and who has access to abortion. We worked through all the images, a nice detail in every story. I love the front page—a group hug.”
In many ways Contá Conmigo itself feels like a group hug—for the storytellers, readers, and their listeners. “The story in Parliament is that abortion is a very lonely thing. But the stories in Contá Conmigo are very different—stories of friendship, collective care.” As Lucía had predicted, the stories aren’t one-dimensional: “There’s a lot of duality in the complexity of the stories,” she told me. “Yes, abortion is stigmatized and we reproduce that stigma. But also to recognize that shame and sadness and confusion coexist with abortion as a decision in the context of our lives, and with us as the experts of our lives. We’re not unidimensional people. In most of the cases in Contá Conmigo stories speak of institutional violence and misinformation given within the health care setting. So there’s this reflection that it was difficult and the system did not support me but in the end I felt relieved and happy.”
Because ACP aims to encourage discoveries about new ways to reduce abortion stigma, I was curious whether Lucía and her collaborators had tried different ways of talking about abortion over the course of the project, or whether the way she thinks about abortion has changed? “At the beginning,” she told me, “I was very firm in saying that abortion is health care, a medical process, a service/access issue. And while it is, I now think that abortions are also moments and events in people’s lives, in a life that has many rich chapters. So it’s part of your health but also intersects with your plans, dreams, ambitions, love life.”
She went on to explain, “Sometimes when we want to break the stigma we fall into the trap of unidimensional thinking—like abortion is either really happy and empowering or really sad and difficult. But we have to create space to fight stigma at the same time that it can be difficult.” For example, “The first story we received was somebody telling a beautiful abortion story that happened outside legal channels. She was narrating how she was at home with a friend, and her friends came and they made her cake—just this beautiful, supportive, amazing experience. And then the second story was a super difficult story, barriers to access in the legal system, how she felt she couldn’t tell anybody, she and her partner kept this as a secret for a long time. Two very different stories—both very secure of their decisions—but the journey, was navigated in very different ways.”
I asked Lucía: If you could wave a magic wand, what’s one aspect of normative abortion conversations or rhetoric you’d change? And what might you replace it with? She paused, and then said, “I would get rid of the reduction of maternal mortality as the goal. Yes, 100% we need to reduce maternal mortality from unsafe abortion, that’s the baseline. But I want it to be about—we have the right to have a dignified life. My only ambition when I access abortion should not be that I should not die. The law should be about giving me access to abortion in a dignified manner, not that I should not die. Accessing abortion without dying is not enough.”
“The Uruguayan government says, ‘we have reduced maternal mortality we have almost no death from unsafe abortion.’ I’m like, okay great, but those are breadcrumbs. I hear stories of people forced to listen to a fetal heartbeat, stories where people have to travel 400 kilometers to get the prescription for misoprostol. That is not dignified access. That is not something to be celebrated. Let’s try to push the narrative of abortion access not only on the basis of survival but of dignity.”
“Let’s try to push the narrative of abortion access not only on the basis of survival but of dignity.”
Even though they haven’t had the chance to meet in person yet, Lucía and her collaborators have had important connections with the Contá Conmigo storytellers. “When the first message came through—we received a lot of stories, and then suddenly—this message of thanks, affirmation, something like, ‘thank you so much for reading my story and creating this space…I just wish you luck and love.’ So much emotion, love, support in that message. I felt very touched.” And with each story that came in, Lucía also felt like the narratives she encountered as a researcher were finally starting to be corrected. “Parliament discussed abortion for decades, I read pages and pages—but then with this project I felt like, this is where the real stories are.”