Nasze ciała to pole bitwy - NYT

Portrait of Lizzie (not her real name), 12, in the bedroom she shares her with family in Tegucigalpa, Honduras, on April 14, 2019. Lizzie is just weeks away from giving birth to a baby girl after being raped by a family member of her mom’s boyfriend. She still doesn’t totally understand what pregnancy means or what childbirth entails, but she knows the delivery is looming, and that scares her. She knows she doesn’t want to be a mother. Lizzie and her family live in a different house now, a dark concrete single room divided and shared between Lizzie, her mom, and her mom’s boyfriend, and there’s barely any privacy, but they couldn’t stay where they were. When Lizzie’s mom found out about the rape, she reported it, and now the man is in jail, but his family – Lizzie’s mom’s boyfriend’s family – kept threatening them. And who knows how long the man who raped Lizzie will stay behind bars. This is Honduras, after all, where 95 percent of cases of sexual violence go uninvestigated. “I hope he remains [in jail],” Lizzie’s mom says. “Because if he comes out, I am afraid for my life and her life too.” And so they moved, which meant Lizzie’s mom had to quit her job, which means there’s not much money for a new baby. A local women’s shelter is helping Lizzie with counseling, and they also pay for her medical bills and her transportation, but no amount of money can undo the rape of a child; no amount of therapy can prepare a scared, scarred 12-year-old for motherhood. But at least it’s something. “At first, she said that she did not want to have the baby,” Lizzie’s mom says. “She said that she wanted to commit suicide.” According to the director of the women’s shelter, when doctors told Lizzie she was pregnant and explained that pregnancy meant she was going to have a baby, Lizzie, in her soft, small voice, asked if she could have a doll instead. Lizzie also asked for an abortion. But this is Honduras – the procedure is outlawed entirely, with no exceptions for rape, incest, or the life of the pregnant woman (or in this case, girl). And so Lizzie, her fully pregnant belly protruding in jarring juxtaposition to her diminutive preteen frame, is no longer able to go to school, and waits at home for her delivery date. She confides in her little stuffed bunny. She draws pictures of flowers and tapes them to the wall. And she reads her favorite fairytale, Little Red Riding Hood. But in her version of the story, there’s no hunter slaying the wolf; instead, Little Red Riding Hood and the wolf becomes friends. This is Lizzie’s favorite part. She likes the idea of a happy ending for a little girl facing a big, bad unknown. Violence against women is endemic in Central America, and in Honduras, it has a particularly high cost: Emergency contraception is outlawed, and so rape survivors can't prevent pregnancy; abortion is criminalized in all cases, and women who end pregnancies can face close to a decade in prison. The patriarchal culture that fuels violence, advocates say, is the same one that upholds some of the most extreme restrictions on reproductive rights in the world. All of this creates a climate in which many women see no option but to flee, risking their lives to travel to the United States.