Kylie Cheung

In 2023, the New York Times reported that Polish researchers have invented a test that can detect whether someone has taken abortion pills and differentiate a naturally occurring miscarriage from a medication abortion. The implications of this are vast, given the total criminal abortion ban in Poland, which has already killed several women in the country. In 2021, shortly after imposing its abortion ban, Poland rolled out a nationalized registry to track pregnancies. One Polish outlet reported on police mining through a woman’s sewage in search of a potential aborted fetus.

None of these developments are unfolding in a vacuum. The antiabortion movement and patriarchy writ large are global. Since Poland launched its pregnancy registry, such a program has been floated by Donald Trump and JD Vance, who comprise the Republican presidential ticket. Now that Louisiana has become the first state to criminalize abortion pills, how long do you think it will take before Polish researchers’ test to differentiate medication abortion from miscarriage appears in the US, where abortion and pregnancy loss are already widely criminalized? In September, the US-based organization Pregnancy Justice published a report that showed that the most cases of pregnancy-related criminalization took place in the year between June 2022 and June 2023—the first year after the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade. 

As I read Belén’s story in What Happened to Belén: The Unjust Imprisonment That Sparked a Women’s Rights Movement by Ana Elena Correa, all of this was front of mind for me. In 2014, Belén went to a local hospital serving low-income communities in Tucumán, Argentina, experiencing severe abdominal pain; days later, she left in handcuffs after experiencing a miscarriage while not even knowing she was pregnant. She was jailed for two years. All of this was a decade ago, and in a different country from where I report on reproductive rights and gender-based violence—and all of it was chillingly prescient.

Belén recounts that, as she lay in severe pain in her hospital bed, a nurse made her look at her fetal remains and told her, “This is your son. Look what you did, bitch.” (In 2022, If/When/How published a report showing that the majority of cases of self-managed abortion that come to the attention of law enforcement are reported by health care workers.) Still reeling from her miscarriage, Belén was separated from her family and taken to a jail across the street. Her family sought criminal defense lawyers who charged them exorbitant fees only to actively sabotage Belén because they believed she was guilty. 

In What Happened to Belén, Correa tells the inspiring story of the women attorneys who took Belén’s case and won her freedom through both legal advocacy and cultural change. But the book also paints a harrowing portrait of what Belén had to endure first—and much of it was all too similar to what women, especially women of color, have faced in the US.

During her trial, Belén learned prosecutors named her miscarried fetus “N.N.” A prosecutor invokes the Belém do Pará Convention, “an international treaty whose goal is to prevent, penalize, punish, and combat any and all violence against women. Only he doesn’t cite it in defense of Belén but of her fetus,” Correa writes. Juan Méndez, then the United Nations’ special rapporteur on torture, told Correa, “Women and children are subjected to multiple forms of violence, both in the field of sexual and reproductive rights and by way of laws, policies, and state practices aimed at controlling their lives and their bodies.” 

As I read about all of this, I immediately thought of the increasingly powerful movement for fetal personhood in the US. Méndez’s words recalled the insights that Dana Sussman, executive vice president of Pregnancy Justice, shared with me in 2022: When an embryo is considered a “baby,” this “[normalizes] the idea that a pregnant person is not their own person anymore, that they’re subservient to the rights, individuality, and full personhood of a fetus.” She explained, “If their rights are secondary to the fetus, or at odds with the fetus, that lends to an environment in which violence—whether it’s state violence like imprisonment, or interpersonal violence—can be committed against pregnant people with far less accountability.”

Belén’s story is a classic example of this, of how women’s dehumanization justifies state violence—such as incarceration and family separation—against them. Her story isn’t rare in Tucumán, where, Correa writes, 24 percent of all suits filed against women since 2008 “correspond to adverse obstetric outcomes” like abortion and miscarriage. And permutations of Belén’s story aren’t rare in the US, where Pregnancy Justice has tracked thousands of cases of criminal charges related to pregnancy in the last fifty years. A decade after her arrest, Belén’s case remains as crushingly relevant as it’s ever been.

“The doctors who accused me are still living their lives,” Belén wrote while in jail. “The men who convicted me get to go on like nothing happened.… They don’t know what it’s like waking up in the same place every day, being away from your family every day.” She continued, “They tortured me, made me look at a black thing like this, the size of a hand, lying in a box. They sentenced me and then they washed their hands. Now I want them to fix it.” Her words have stayed with me. In a world where the medical and carceral systems are increasingly, violently linked, doctors who willingly take on the role of cops will continue to live their lives, continue to harm their patients, and women like Belén will be the ones to live with the consequences—or perhaps die from them.

Cora Fernández Anderson

Latin America has historically been known for its restrictive abortion policies that stem from a legacy of colonialism and the political influence of the Catholic Church. Until 2012, the only Latin American country allowing abortion on demand was Cuba. In the last fifteen years, a strong movement for abortion rights, known as the Green Tide (so named for the green bandanas activists have chosen as their symbol), has swept Latin America from south to north. Uruguay (2012), Argentina (2020), Colombia (2022), and Mexico (2021 and 2023) have all legalized abortion on demand and mandated that the procedure be available for free in public hospitals. Other countries, such as Chile, Bolivia, and Ecuador, have liberalized some of their restrictive laws. Meanwhile in North America, the US Supreme Court reversed forty-nine years of legal abortion on demand through their ruling in Dobbs vs. Jackson Women’s Health Organization in June 2022. 

It is in this particular hemispheric context that Ana Elena Correa brings us the story of Belén, a 27-year-old Argentine woman who, in 2014, was imprisoned for a spontaneous abortion in the conservative province of Tucumán in the northwest of Argentina. It was only after spending close to two and a half years in prison, and thanks to the work of feminist lawyers and the solidarity of activists organizing in the streets, that she was able to appeal her sentence and be released. 

This is a story that rings true throughout many of the Latin American countries that are still embracing total bans such as El Salvador, Nicaragua, Honduras, and the Dominican Republic. Between 1999 and 2011 El Salvador sentenced seventeen women to up to forty years of jail time after suffering spontaneous abortion. This also speaks to the new reality across the US South and Midwest, where abortion has been heavily criminalized since the reversal of Roe. Pregnant women experiencing miscarriages, like Brittany Watts in Ohio or Amari Marsh in South Carolina, have found themselves arrested and charged with “crimes against their own pregnancies.” This is not completely new. The US-based organization Pregnancy Justice has shown that between 2006 and 2022, 120 people were arrested for stillbirths and miscarriages. Without the protection of Roe, pregnant people are now even more vulnerable and cases like these will unfortunately increase. 

“The truth is not enough,” states Correa, when telling Belén’s story. Unfortunately, this is the experience of thousands of women trapped in a patriarchal and misogynistic judicial system in which they are considered guilty from day one with no proof. Belén was sentenced to eight years for aggravated homicide. This was done without any evidence, no DNA test, no body. It was only when feminist lawyers, journalists, and organizations came together to create a new narrative that Belén was given a second chance. The 2015 demonstrations against femicide that gave birth to the Ni una menos movement (Not one woman less), together with the rising Campaign for Safe, Legal, and Free Abortion, provided a societal environment conducive to believing Belén’s story and advocating for her innocence. 

The book is a collection of beautifully written vignettes through which we discover not only Belén’s story but also the story of the legalization of abortion in Argentina. Through these intertwined stories, Ana Elena Correa transmits us hope—in feminism, in collective action, and in sorority and solidarity. It is a message we desperately need to hear and a strategy we need to embrace in the US. 

Julia McReynolds-Pérez

In a small town in a conservative region, a young woman suffered a pregnancy loss and was charged with murder. She was immediately held without bond, separated from her family and loved ones, and faced the possibility of years in prison if convicted. This is the story of a young woman known as Belén, in Argentina’s Tucumán province. But this is also the story of Amari Marsh, a Black college student in South Carolina, a short distance from where I live and teach, who was recently cleared by a grand jury over a year after charges were brought against her. As I read about the Belén in Argentina in Ana Elena Correa’s What Happened to Belén, translated by Julia Sanches, I thought of the South Carolina Belén and how many other Beléns there are and will be in the post-Dobbs United States.

As a feminist researcher who lives and teaches in the United States and researches abortion in my native Argentina, the last few years have been an intellectual and emotional whirlwind. At the end of 2020, Argentina’s feminist movement won a hard-fought victory in the passage of a broad legal reform making abortion free and available on demand through fourteen weeks of gestation and without gestational limit under legal exceptions for health and rape. I was in Argentina eighteen months later, in June of 2022, studying the ongoing efforts to implement the new law, when the Dobbs decision was handed down in the US, unleashing a state-by-state fight to keep abortion legal and accessible.

Through these dramatic events in the two countries I consider home, it has been tempting to search in Argentina’s Green Tide for strategies that could easily and quickly translate to the US context. Could we flood the streets with young people wearing green bandanas? Could we hold weeks of televised hearings which make abortion the topic of conversation at every family dinner? Could we promote abortion accompaniment, a direct-action strategy where groups of activists help people access abortion safely outside of the formal healthcare system? Could we ridicule antiabortion activists as “dinosaurs” out of touch with the lives of young people and reckless in their cruelty to pregnant people? 

Of course, activists and advocates are using versions of many of these strategies , and others, in ways that make sense in the US reality. But I’ve realized that there are no simple shortcuts to import the feminist strategies that worked in Argentina to the United States. This doesn’t mean that there aren’t important lessons to be learned. Correa’s book is one place to start to get a slice of that story. It hews closely to the story of Belén herself: a young woman who didn’t know she was pregnant who was accused of a crime after seeking emergency care, the over two years she spent in prison before her conviction was overturned, and the suffering that she and her family experienced. The book also details the important work that was done to bring attention to her case: the feminist lawyers and journalists who brought her case to light while also protecting her identity; the role of the #niunamenos movement against gender violence that added “Freedom for Belén” to its repertoire of chants at feminist mobilizations, and the work of organizations like Amnesty International and various Argentine feminist nongovernmental organizations in bringing international attention to the case.

The book is written as dozens of short chapters that move back and forth between Belén’s medical emergency and her detention, her time in prison and eventual release, the work of her advocates and allies, the details of her legal case, and the broader efforts to legalize abortion. This makes for a quick and engaging read that I think would work well with students. The connections to the broader movement might be a bit confusing for readers not already familiar with the broad timeline of events in Argentina. But where the book really shines is in giving readers a window into the life of the young woman at the center of this story: the bright spark of determination, empathy, and persistence that is Belén. As abortion tragedies proliferate, this is an important reminder of the humanity of every single victim.

Zoe Sullivan

On a Friday in March, 2014, Belén (not her real name) goes to the public hospital with severe abdominal pain in her northern Argentine city of Tucumán. Belén is 25. She lives with her parents and three of her six siblings in a low-income town just outside the backwater provincial capital. After graduating from high school, Belén didn’t have the resources to continue with her education, although that was her dream. Tucumán province harbors stark inequality – and regressive policies towards women.

A few years earlier, Belén had undergone abdominal surgery for peritonitis, a serious infection of thoracic tissues that can lead to death. As she lies in a hospital bed, connected to an IV, Belén begins hemorrhaging. Before she can be taken into an operating room, a police officer barges into the room and announces that a fetus has been found in a bathroom at the opposite end of the hospital. The physician hands over Belén’s medical chart and the officer writes “homicide” on it. 

This is how Belén’s story begins. After recovering from surgery and blood loss, she was handcuffed and taken to jail as they presumed she had induced an illegal abortion. The first attorney she hired, a grifter, took the money her family had borrowed and disappeared. The second, a public defender, presumed Belén guilty and didn’t bother to review the documentation in her case. As a result, two years after her hospital visit, Belén goes on trial for murder and is convicted and sentenced to eight years in prison. 

Author Ana Maria Correa interweaves Belén’s story with glimpses into Argentina’s feminist organizing. She describes how the movement tapped into Amnesty International’s network to bring Belén’s case to global attention. Correa narrates how Belén came to write her story so that it can be read on a prominent national radio program, alerting women around the country to what had happened to her. But there was also the national Freedom for Belén march, which saw some three thousand women march to the courthouse in Tucumán while similar demonstrations rattled the country in 100 different cities. 

Belén’s ultimate victory would not have been possible without the organizational stability and solidarity of Argentina’s feminist movement. Just before her trial, a local attorney, Soledad Deza, heard about Belén’s case. Deza had been involved with Argentina’s feminist movement for years, and she committed to helping free Belén. 

Ultimately, the feminist movement, energized by young people demanding an end to femicide and access to comprehensive sex education and free, legal abortion, convinced Argentina’s congress to legalize elective abortion care up to fourteen weeks of pregnancy. 

The story also offers a cautionary tale for the United States, where women’s reproductive rights are facing a growing onslaught, and criminalizing pregnancy complications has become a real threat. These policies reflect a deep-seated urge to control reproduction and women’s bodies that is often tied to a larger right-wing worldview, and researchers like Ruth Ben-Ghiat and others have pointed out the links between authoritarian strongmen, misogyny, and “traditional” gender norms. 

Belén’s story reminds us of the pivotal role that social movements play in obtaining justice and creating social change – just as it reminds us that the personal is political.

Ana Elena Correa

I wrote What Happened to Belén as a way of refusing to resign myself to lies. The dream that, after 97 years, abortion would no longer be criminalized in Argentina had just been shattered with false arguments during the 2018 congressional debate. In the senate and on the streets, people were saying, “But no woman has ever been jailed for abortion in Argentina.”

Belén had been imprisoned just two years earlier. And she wasn’t the only one facing criminal charges for a miscarriage. Belén wasn’t her real name; she adopted a pseudonym because in a country where abortion is criminalized, being identified as someone who had an abortion is equivalent to being labeled a criminal.

I sought out Belén so she could tell me her story. I spoke with her family, her lawyer, and even some of the judges who convicted her. Until 2018, there was an unwritten agreement to almost never talk about abortion in mass media in Argentina, with only rare exceptions. What isn’t named is rendered clandestine, deemed illicit by those in power.

Argentina’s historical trajectory changed. Not only was the argument that no women were imprisoned for abortion absent from the 2020 congressional debate, but the book was cited in both chambers. Abortion was legalized in Argentina. The criminalization of women didn’t reach its 100th anniversary.

But the story didn’t end there. In Argentina and the United States, movements are currently in power that explicitly demonize the fight for women’s rights. As Kylie Cheung points out, Belén’s story is a classic example of how the dehumanization of women often ends up justifying state violence against them.

In this moment, when many—if not all—feminist activists are leaving the social network Twitter/X, which played a significant role not only in Belén’s liberation but also in the legalization of abortion, Julia McReynolds-Perez asks whether an experience like Argentina’s can be replicated in the United States. While she notes many differences, she highlights one thing that can perhaps be salvaged today, as has happened so often throughout history: empathy, determination, and persistence in the struggles we win and discovering the humanity in every victim seem essential.

Zoe Sullivan issues a warning for the United States, but as we debated in Argentina, it’s applicable to every place in the world at this moment in history: “Women’s reproductive rights are facing a growing onslaught, and criminalizing pregnancy complications has become a real threat. These policies reflect a deep-seated urge to control reproduction and women’s bodies that is often tied to a larger right-wing worldview, and researchers like Ruth Ben-Ghiat and others have pointed out the links between authoritarian strongmen, misogyny, and ‘traditional’ gender norms.” A similar connection is made by Cora Fernández Anderson, to whom I am especially grateful when she notes that What Happened to Belén is also a source of hope. Otherwise, what are we supposed to do with all of this? Hope, networks, learning from the past, staying vigilant in the present, and working toward the future—that is our task, yesterday, today, and tomorrow as well.

Thank you so much to Kylie Cheung, Cora Fernández Anderson, Julia McReynolds-Pérez, and Zoe Sullivan for reading, and to Signs for giving space to Belén’s story from Argentina.