By Dave Andrusko
Courtesy/Webb County Sheriff’s Office
When we think of forced abortions, typically we’re talking about men coercing women into taking abortion-inducing drugs such as mifepristone. But the suspect this time is allegedly the mother of teenage daughter who told her on March 30 that she was pregnant.
On April 2, police said officers responded to a domestic disturbance at the family’s home. The teenage girl told them her mother had forcibly attempted to induce an abortion, according to the Laredo Morning Times.
The sequence went like this. Juana Idalia Sanchez confronted her daughter and asked her to have an abortion.
She stated that her mother chased her around the home causing her to fall on her stomach, states an arrest affidavit.
Sanchez pinned her to the floor to try to force her daughter to ingest pills that would induce an abortion. Sanchez managed to shove the pills in her mouth, but the daughter spit them out, authorities said
Sanchez, 49, was arrested on the charge of assault of a pregnant person.
Coerced abortions are on the increase. Chemical abortifacients can be slipped into drinks, hiding what is happening from the pregnant woman or girl.
The BBC—no friend to the pro-life movement in England or the United States– commissioned a survey last year of 1,000 UK women aged 18-44 – “and found that 50% said they had experienced at least one type of reproductive coercion” [].
Winnie Porter, a midwife at the abortion chain MSI Reproductive Choices, spoke with the BBC about the survey. “Winnie believes reproductive coercion is not well recognized among health professionals,” according to Alys Harte and Rachel Stonehouse. “I’d say it’s almost a bit of a blind spot for a lot of services,” she says.
Porter also said she sees many women who feel pressured into abortions.
Indeed, while Porter was being interviewed, there was a knock on the door. “There’s a woman in the room next to us being pressured by her partner into a termination she doesn’t want,” Harte and Stonehouse reported.