VivirLatino

In honor of International Women’s Day and Women’s History Month, I’ve been doing a lot of research on Latinas and health. I’m planning on posting the huge amount of resources that I’ve discovered–I hope you find them interesting!

Latinas are, in general, an understudied population. I think it’s largely due to the facts that “Latina” is such an unstable identity marker (i.e. it can mean so many different populations of women) and that especially in the US, Latinas are still a migratory people. That is, while there are stable settled communities that Latinas exist in–even in those settled communities, a large population of women have only been there one or two generations.

So, some of the resources I’ve found may not be directly about Latinas–but it will always be information that Latinas can use.

The first resource I want to focus on is a zine put out by Sage-Femmes called Rediscovering Self-Induced Abortions.

Latinas already utilize a lot of their own resources in self-inducing their own abortions. Many women can get chemicals and medicines from their home countries without a prescription. But once they get to the US, it is difficult to near impossible to find those same resources. This zine is amazing in that it covers everything from herbs (which often *can* be found at local stores and co-ops) to acupressure points to actual penetration of the uterus.

I do not recommend or disagree with self-induced abortions–but I am totally and completely for women having the right to understand and access their bodies in a way that is based in community knowledge, history and experiences that other women have had. I think it’s an interesting read just for that quality alone!

The zine can be found here and can be downloaded free of charge (it’s 497 pages–a little long to print off, but free!).

via/ The Lilith Plan