Woven Together by Choice

CONTENT WARNING: This story includes graphic content. Reader discretion is advised.

*Some of the names in this story have been changed to protect the identities of the individuals.

In the hot, stagnant air of a late April Wednesday in Oaxaca City, Mexico, dozens of hands raise to the sky. They hold bunches of rosemary, basil, and the widely used medicinal herb rue. A deep, sharp note bellows forth, echoing around the pockmarked pillars of the open-air courtyard.

Standing before us, beside a blue-tiled fountain and below multi-colored bandana bunting, a middle-aged woman named *Rosa, small in stature but commanding nonetheless, holds a conch shell to her lips. More than 40 people — mostly women, a handful of men sprinkled throughout — have gathered here. Some have traveled for more than 12 hours in buses from distant rural communities in Southern Mexico. Others have flown in on airplanes from cities far north. We all look to Rosa in her hand-stitched purple dress, her half-moon earrings swinging, as she leads us in prayer.

Dresses and skirts billow every time our group turns to face each of the four cardinal directions, invoking the medicinal energy of the plants in our hands. When we’re once again facing the fountain and its large painted tile of Jesus, Rosa instructs us to rub the plants over our hair and necks, then to stick them under our armpits, and then between our legs.

“We are here to honor the plant medicine,” she says, “to honor nature, and to honor the medicines of science.”

As the last notes of incense extinguish in the dry heat, we conclude our ritual. Now the abortion training can begin.

~~

The day before, in a yellow-walled pottery studio a few blocks east of Oaxaca’s city center, MSI Reproductive Choices (formerly Marie Stopes International) Latin America managing director Araceli López-Nava briefs a small group of international donors on the nonprofit’s work.

Outfitted in a sharp, sleeveless black dress, her brown hair sleek and eyes unwavering, Araceli is stone-faced as she recounts stories of harassment and abuse. But she recovers quickly, shifting to smiling reassurances of hope. She’s well-practiced at this emotional swing. Her job requires conviction to lead a workforce of hundreds — and warmth to reassure a patient pool in the tens of thousands.

MSI Reproductive Choices is the largest abortion provider in Mexico. In the wake of the country’s Supreme Court abortion decriminalization decision in 2023, MSI expanded its efforts through financially sustainable clinics and telemedicine providers across the nation. The charity boasts a clinic network with dozens of doctors and nurses. But MSI’s reach — serving more than 61,600 clients in 2024 alone — would be impossible without their symbiosis with 735 midwives who bring reproductive care to Mexico’s rural, sometimes impoverished, and often Indigenous areas.

These midwives — dozens of whom are, at this very moment, en route to an abortion training here in Oaxaca — face countless barriers to providing contraception, safe abortion, and other reproductive care. There’s the social and religious stigma of sex in the communities they live and work in; the psychological distortion caused by the abuse many of their patients have experienced; and the judgment of clinical medicine as foreign, cold, and expensive.

Then there are the obstacles of acquiring the necessary medicines and transporting them across state borders, through cartel-controlled territories, across deserts and mountains and beaches, and into the hands of the girls and women who are seeking them. Such a gargantuan effort raises the question: What drives them to do this — and how on earth do they pull it off?

But when Araceli opens the table for questions, one of the American donors brings up another topic: patients from the U.S. crossing the border to get abortion care in Mexico.

It’s true, Araceli confirms. “And not just patients, but doctors as well.”

Last year, she says, more than 35 doctors came to Mexico from the United States to receive abortion training from MSI. The physicians perform at least 40 abortion procedures during their training. “It really helps,” she says, “because they aren’t getting adequate training in the U.S.”

One of the most significant training needs, Araceli adds, is for second and third trimester abortions — a procedure whose patients are the most likely to have suffered rape, incest, and other traumas that delay their care. They are also the most likely to be under the age of 18, with some coming in as young as nine or 10 years old.

“This can’t keep happening.”

After a pensive pause from her audience, Araceli concludes the session. A young woman, the owner of the pottery shop — Casa de Todas Partes, which translates as “The House of All Places” — steps in with a tentative smile. She places a gray sphere on the table in front of Araceli.

“I haven’t done this in years,” Araceli says, tentatively sinking her hands into the clay.

~~

It’s nearly impossible to get accurate data for the rate of femicides (cases of women killed because of their gender) in Mexico, but what we do know is frightening. Mexico’s femicides are believed to be the second highest in Latin America. It’s estimated that 10 women or girls are killed in the country every single day — a number that has increased by 137% since 2015. Some researchers believe these numbers are underreported, but of the reported cases, only 3% are typically prosecuted and only 1% reach sentencing.

For human rights lawyer Sandra Estefana Domínguez Martínez, a 38-year-old woman of Mixe descent (an Indigenous group of Oaxaca’s eastern highlands and mountainous regions), these dark statistics were personal. She focused on the plight of women — and Indigenous women in particular — by taking on cases of rape and femicide specifically. In 2020, she publicly denounced several of Oaxaca’s government officials for participating in misogynist group chats, where they allegedly shared images of Indigenous women alongside degrading comments. According to Sandra’s colleagues, it wasn’t the first time she had taken on government officials or members of organized crime.

“Sandra has always handled delicate cases,” her close friend and fellow Oaxacan activist Joaquín Galvan would later tell reporters. “She was always exposed to threats.”

Then, on October 4, 2024, Sandra and her husband, Alexander Hernández Hernández, disappeared.

Family, friends, and fellow feminists took to social media to pressure authorities and spread the word of the couple’s disappearance. As the days turned to weeks, Joaquín articulated a dire hope:

“We want to find her alive.”

~~

In Tlacolula — one of Oaxaca’s cold, high valleys — the pyramids of Mitla still stand in a ring of mountains, roughly two thousand years after Zapotec priests once placed human hearts in pits of fire as offerings to the gods. Though the pyramids were built by the Zapotec, their mosaics and geometric stone patterns — featured in columns, walls, panels, and tombs — are largely the work of the Mixtec, the Zapotec’s successors.

In all of Mexico, no other archeological site boasts these kinds of intricate designs, built from small, polished stones painstakingly embedded without mortar. But now, long after the Mixtec have left, their zigzags, spirals, diamonds, and interlocking patterns have been reincarnated in very different materials.

Artisans throughout Oaxaca have adopted styles of sewing that are typical of their locations. In the tiny town of Asunción Ixtaltepec in southeastern Oaxaca, Indigenous weaving techniques knit together with modern machinery — namely, the Singer sewing machine — to bring the designs of ancient pyramids into the dresses of dancers like *Luz Cocijo.

Centuries after her Zapotec ancestors walked the lands of Oaxaca’s Istmo de Tehuantepec, Luz, a 40-year-old woman with a round face, a wide smile, and a full-bellied laugh, dances for the region’s famous “Guelaguetza” festival.

Considered the largest folkloric festival in the Americas, Guelaguetza’s celebrations last for weeks. Throughout the festival, hundreds of dancers, Luz included, ascend onto large stages and parade down the city streets. Their spectacular dresses — including Luz’s pyramid-patterned gowns — showcase a level of bespoke, textile artistry that can cost the equivalent of half a year’s rent.

Turning and stomping as she flourishes her skirt before a roaring crowd, Luz’s presence is dazzling, her pride in her attire infectious. She was meant for the stage.

~~

When she wasn’t dancing, Luz used to work as a host at Asunción Ixtaltepec’s local radio station. One day, in 2008, she found herself recording an advertisement for a foundation looking for a doctor and a doctor’s assistant for a clinic opening in a neighboring town. One of the requirements was to speak Luz’s first language, Zapotec.

After recording the ad, Luz turned to the young woman who had come to the studio on behalf of the foundation.

“Listen, do the doctors from your organization perform abortions?” Luz asked.

The young woman smiled. “Why do you ask?”

“Because the ad says, ‘Children by choice, not by chance.’”

The young woman tilted her head and looked at Luz. “Are you in favor?”

It was only the second time in her life Luz had been asked her thoughts on abortion, but her answer came quickly.

“Before, I wasn’t,” Luz admitted. “But now, I believe that every woman has the right to decide her future.”

~~

We all look to Rosa in her hand-stitched purple dress, her half-moon earrings swinging, as she leads us in prayer.

After the abortion training’s opening ritual, we break into discussion groups, fanning out into the tiled rooms surrounding the courtyard.

I had planned to stand to the side, pen in hand, recording the workshop’s events in my reporter’s notebook. But that plan flew out the window as soon as I met these women, heard their stories, and was handed the herbs for the opening ritual. Now I find myself sitting on the tiles with them, woven into their discussions about guiding their patients through medicated abortion — how to take histories, how to identify complications, how to practice the human side of care. I learn that these midwives host their patients in their own homes, making them tea and dinner, bringing them hot water bottles for the pain.

As the sessions continue, I keep my eye out for Rosa’s purple dress, but she has disappeared.

Instead, I make friends with a woman resplendent with a dazzling smile, bright red flowers in her hair, named Luz. After a while, Luz reveals that after the opening ceremony, Rosa had reluctantly slipped out the front door. She has funeral rites to perform, and she cannot miss them.

As the breakout sessions continue, Rosa travels across the city of Oaxaca, preparing herself to lead the prayers of burial for her dear friend Sandra, whose body was found beside her husband’s in the neighboring state of Veracruz just a handful of days ago — more than six months after the feminist activist’s disappearance.

~~

It was one in the morning when Luz left her house on April 24, 2025. None of the local buses were running yet, so she waited in the dark for a taxi to arrive from a neighboring town and bring her to the regional bus station.

She had squeezed her clothing and personal items into a tiny bag and her purse. That way, the large suitcase she dragged alongside her and the backpack she carried could be packed to the brim with IUDs and abortion kits. The midwives she was traveling to desperately needed them — especially the abortion pill Mifepristone, which Mexico has only recently declared a non-controlled drug. The medication is practically impossible to get a hold of in rural areas.

It has been seventeen years since Luz first traveled to Oaxaca’s neighboring province of Chiapas for the week-long training to become a medical assistant for MSI Reproductive Choices Mexico — answering the radio ad she herself recorded. These days, she works with hundreds of midwives and frequently crosses state lines. But even all these years later, she still gets nervous. She knows most people won’t know what she carries in her bags, but just the fact that she’s a woman, traveling alone in a country where so many women — and the people who defend them — die at the hands of violence every day, can be terrifying.

“We want to find her alive.”

She takes all the precautions she can. On this trip, she would not take the more direct route along the coast, where the risk of assault is higher. Instead, she would take the bus leaving her hometown of Asunción Ixtaltepec at two in the morning so she could catch the 10 a.m. flight from Oaxaca City inland to Mexico City.

Barbara Perez, MSI Mexico’s Midwife Program Coordinator, would be waiting for Luz in the capital, and they would continue the trip together. Since they were headed into a largely cartel-controlled territory, they agreed to enter the state side by side. 

This way was safer, but it would take Luz 18 and a half hours to get from her house to where they would stay in Chilpancingo, Guerrero.

~~

Barbara arrives late, once all the plates of guacamole, fried crickets, tamales, and chiles rellenos at the dinner tables sit abandoned.

She sits beside me, bright-eyed, the two tight buns on her head bobbing as she talks nonstop about the all-day sex-ed workshop she led in Oaxaca’s neighboring town of Tlacolula.

By day’s end, about 200 high school students had wandered through the town’s central plaza to play contraception-themed Twister and guess the locations of the clitoris and vaginal canals on multi-colored felt vulvas.

As I take another helping from the irresponsible amount of mole still on the tables before us, I ask Barbara about MSI’s midwives program, which she has been running for more than 12 years.

The program, she explains, is a network. Promoters like herself and Luz are focal points that bring hundreds of threads together. The midwives are the wefts that bring knowledge and resources out to the rural areas, knitting them together with local practices and beliefs, and connecting with the women and girls who need help the most.

Barbara wants to expand the network. She’s focused on the state of Guerrero, from where she and Luz have just returned: There are girls there that need their help. And she’s worried about the migrants from countries south of Mexico who are being assaulted along their migration routes and need abortion care from people they can trust.

Suddenly, the fatigue of the day seems to hit Barbara, and she pauses for a moment as we regard the large tree in the center of the restaurant’s courtyard. I tell her I found the women at the abortion training to be strong and knowledgeable but also warm and approachable.

“They seem very skilled at building trust,” I say, which elicits vigorous head nods from Barbara.

“It’s remarkable,” I add, “how seamlessly the group embraced the mix of plant medicine, religion, science, modern medicine — and each other. Most of them had never met, and yet, somehow, they already seemed connected.”

Barbara smiles. “There’s nothing more powerful,” she says, “than a tight web of women.”

~~

Painfully full after my dinner with Barbara, I sit in my stone-walled hotel room in the former 16th-century Convent of Santa Catalina de Siena and peruse the materials I’ve collected during my week-long visit with the MSI team.

Fittingly, my hand hovers over a worksheet from Tlacolula’s sex-ed workshop, titled Para Reflexionar — “to reflect.”

The worksheet is filled with lined boxes for the teens to take notes on some heavy questions — Who can you turn to if you need help? What would you say to a friend who confides in you that their pregnancy is unwanted?

But I can’t help but smile at the last question on the worksheet, which feels practically revolutionary: How can you eroticize your self-care to help you feel more connected to your body?

~~

It was only the second time in her life Luz had been asked her thoughts on abortion.

Twenty-five years ago, *Camila sat on one of the benches beneath a tree in the garden of the high school she worked for. “Luz,” the school psychologist said, turning to the 15-year-old girl next to her. “Do you know what *Nayeli is going to do?”

“Nayeli?” Luz shook her head. “I don’t know, why?”

“How do you not know?” Camila replied, genuinely surprised. “Isn’t she your best friend?”

Camila wasn’t just the school psychologist: She was a mentor to these kids. She and Luz would do community service together, visiting their town’s elderly population. One day, Camila would become Luz’s sister-in-law. But today, she faced an ethical quandary. 

It was only a matter of hours before Luz heard her fellow classmates whispering — Do you know what happened to Nayeli? Then, as Luz walked by the school’s front office, she saw her: hunched over, sobbing into her hands, her fingers covering her face in shame. 

As she watched Nayeli cry, the bubble of Luz’s world popped. Then a feeling rushed in: Was it anger, or pity, or sadness? And Luz thought of the conversation she had had with her best friend the day before — a conversation that would play out in her mind for the next twenty-five years.

“Luz,” Nayeli had asked, “What do you think about abortion?”

Nayeli was the same age as Luz. At school, the two of them were thick as thieves, always joking around. Nayeli was also smart, participative, a quick learner. She loved school. Her family was from the coast — a tiny community called San Mateo del Mar — and to attend high school, Nayeli rented a modest room in Asunción Ixtaltepec. Luz would invite Nayeli over for meals so that she didn’t have to spend money on food, and because Luz’s parents adored her. Often, Nayeli would spend the night, and eventually the two of them felt like true sisters.

But when Nayeli asked the abortion question in Luz’s parents’ living room, she seemed different. Cagey. Said she was asking because she had heard that a mutual friend of theirs was pregnant.

Luz had never been asked this question before. She had never had a sex ed class. She knew, vaguely, about contraceptive methods, but had no idea that they could fail. No one had talked to her about the possibility of sexual abuse or rape. In Luz’s 15-year-old mind, everything was simple: If you had sex and got pregnant, the responsible thing to do was to become a mother.

“Well, it’s her fault, isn’t it?” Luz said emphatically. “If she’s going around sharing her body like that, she needs to be responsible! Tell her that she has to have the child! She must have it!” Luz told Nayeli.

The next day, after leaving Luz at the garden benches, Camila decided to break her silence and go to the school director, who in turn would chase Nayeli down in the parking lot and insist she come back inside — before the girl could catch a ride to the doctor’s office where she planned to get her abortion. 

Standing before the school office, watching Nayeli shake with tears, Luz felt the wind had been knocked out of her, a new reality crashing down. As Luz learned more, that reality took on details: That Nayeli’s relationship with the child’s father was abusive. That the boy hurt her, made Nayeli suffer. That Nayeli suspected he had broken the condom on purpose to force her to stay with him. That they would marry, but he wouldn’t be around for long. That it broke Nayeli’s heart every day to leave her daughter with her grandmother so that Nayeli could go to her high school classes.

But these are all things Luz has heard second-hand, because after that conversation in her parents’ living room, Luz’s best friend never spoke to her again.

~~

The morning after her eighteen-and-a-half-hour travel day, Luz strapped on her backpack and hauled her big suitcase full of abortion kits down the hotel staircases she and Barbara had ascended mere hours before.

Sixteen or 17 women were waiting for her and Barbara in a yoga room that a local health group had offered for their workshop. The women belonged to a group named Afropoderosas — meaning powerful women of African descent — that had approached Barbara months earlier, beseeching her to host an abortion training with them. “Teach us,” they had said, “because we need to know how to be there for these girls.”

She’s focused on the state of Guerrero, from where she and Luz have just returned: There are girls there that need their help.

Barbara had many conversations with Araceli to get MSI’s permission to host the event. Years ago, the foundation used to have a clinic in Guerrero. Were MSI to open a new one, it would now be forced to bribe the cartels if it wanted to operate. And cartel bribery is against the organization’s policy.

The midwife program, however, can — and has — operated outside the influence of the cartels. In fact, MSI hosted a workshop with a few of these same women, eight years ago, in a town high in the mountains, San Luis Acatlán.

During the San Luis Acatlán workshop, *Xiadani was still in training to become a midwife. Now in her mid-30s, she had already gained more than half a decade of experience in the profession.

As the group assembled around the horseshoe tables in the yoga room for one of the training’s breakout sessions, Barbara turned to Xiadani to ask a question she feared the answer to.

“Nini,” Barbara asked, “Remember what you told us last time? Is it still happening?”

“It is,” Xiadani said, as incredulous as her own audience. “There’s a community two hours further up the mountain from San Luis Acatlán where it happened again. There was a girl up there who took Gramoxone. She was 12 years old.”

Gramoxone’s primary ingredient is methyl viologen, a toxic compound known as a “burn-down” pesticide. Even though it didn’t take very long to burn through the young girl’s esophagus, it caused her a prolonged and painful death.

A shocked silence filled the room.

 “This can’t be possible,” Barbara said, shaking her head. “This can’t keep happening.”

~~

The courtyard is bursting with morning sunshine and birdsong as Luz and I sip our hot chocolates under the fuchsia bougainvillea.

For my last breakfast of the trip, Luz has donned a blue skirt and a hand-stitched blouse, the overlapping teal quadrilaterals bright against their black backgrounds, the red borders matched perfectly to her scarlet lipstick. As we pause our conversation to let an airplane fly overhead, I admire the patterns. I see a marriage of ancestral techniques and modern machines, a dance of contrasting colors woven under a single vision, a multi-generational legacy of women.

“There’s nothing more powerful … than a tight web of women.”

Luz tells me that in honor of MSI’s namesake, Marie Stopes, the charity bestows an annual prize called the estopera del año, or “Stopes of the year.” Directors from every sector of the foundation nominate their candidates, and the nonprofit’s staff votes for the winner. Luz felt proud just to have been nominated.

Luz’s son is 15, the same age Nayeli was when she first became a mother. He was there with Luz when she won. Barbara even joked that he should accept the prize himself because when Luz is traveling for work — like she is right now — he will send the packages of medication to the doctors in her network in her absence.

“He’s part of the network too,” Luz says.

When I ask what has happened to Nayeli, Luz is quiet at first. She tells me that at this Oaxaca workshop she spotted a petite young woman — in her mid-20s, about the age Nayeli’s daughter would be — with a rounded face that reminded her of her old friend. When the girl said she was from the same town, Luz said her heart almost stopped.

It wasn’t Nayeli’s daughter, but she gave Luz her number and said she would reach out if she were able to find her. Luz doesn’t want to get her hopes up, but she waits nonetheless.

“I don’t expect her to forgive me,” Luz says. “But I want her to know that what I’ve been doing with my life — ever since I found MSI at 23 years old — I do because I owe it to her.” 

“I wasn’t there for her,” Luz wipes a tear as she continues, “She needed me, and I couldn’t be there for her. So, I help every girl I can now. Every single girl I’ve helped, for me, is Nayeli.”

~~

“Most of them had never met, and yet, somehow, they already seemed connected.”

Another airplane rumbles overhead, and I realize I have to catch my own flight. 

It’s Friday. A lot has happened this week, from Xiadani sharing the story of the latest pesticide poisoning in Guerrero last Friday, to the news breaking on Monday of Sandra’s body being found and her burial on Wednesday, to the abortion workshop that began that very same day.

And a lot has happened in the last 17 years for Luz, who now knows what she should have said to Nayeli, because she says it to every girl she has helped along the way — so many she has lost count:

“I tell them, ‘The decision is yours. The reason is yours. If you want my help, I will help you. But it is your decision. You don’t need to tell me why — that you were violated, that you don’t have the money. You don’t need to say it. It’s your right, and I will support you. There is a solution, and we will do it together.’”

Luz is right: In the end, our stories are ours. And yet, our stories are connected. 

This week, as Luz bore her soul to me, I saw what drives this network of women and how they are woven together. And as Luz and I hug, crying, in the courtyard, I feel our own threads, briefly but purposefully, link.

~~

Back in one of the tiled breakout rooms of the abortion workshop, just as the midday heat has thickened like a blanket upon us, Barbara stands before her weary group, raising her voice above the noise of the traffic leaking through the closed windows.

Behind her is a poster board with a handwritten list of barriers women face as we seek abortion care. Beside it is another with the outline of a woman’s face, surrounded by adjectives describing what she might be feeling — including the word sola.

Barbara glances back at the face, then turns to us.

“Raise your hand,” she says, “if you or someone you know has had an abortion alone.”

Without hesitation, a dozen hands raise to the sky.

“Do you know why we are here?” Barbara asks.

Women lean forward from the walls and chairs and floor tiles we’ve been draped on for the last hour, though Barbara’s answer is clear enough.

“We are here so that no other woman ever has to be alone.”