Text and photos by Sarah Menkedick.

It was hot by 11 a.m.  We were standing directly under the sun, getting redder by the minute, affixing purple bows to our bags.  Women bustled everywhere around us.  Women taking pictures of other women, women distributing buttons and correcting and praising and laughing and shouting and herding and thinking.  The dog, also a woman, put her head down on the hot flat stone and sighed.

We stood there somewhat stupidly for at least forty-five minutes, talking about Laura Bush, Mexico City, ugly dogs, and babies.  Women swarmed and dispersed, swarmed and dispersed around us, all the while more and more of them coagulating around us until we were, effectively, a mass.  Somewhere around this point a tall woman with fierce black gypsy eyes and tight curls shouted, “VAMOS!” and we shuffled down the slight slope onto the pedestrian street, where we formed a linear, vaguely more organized mass.

From there, the march left.

On the 9^th of September, thirty-one government deputies voted in favor of an amendment to Article 12 of the Oaxacan constitution.  This amendment declared that life should be protected from the moment of conception, and effectively criminalized abortion in Oaxaca.

Oaxaca is the second poorest state in Mexico with an average per person income of 30 pesos (roughly $2.50) per day.  80% of Oaxaca’s villages do not satisfy Mexico’s basic health, education and housing standards.  The average Oaxacan has 6.4 years of education.  More than a quarter of the population –mostly men – migrates to the United States, leaving behind entire villages of women and children.  But deputies, who travel in armed motorcades and live in barricaded houses north of the city, have decided that the real problem in Oaxaca is abortion.

To say this is criminal doesn’t really cut it for me.  It’s the kind of news that hits me straight in the gut and makes me sick, particularly when I see women in my neighborhood dragging three or four children in rags down to beg for money in the Zócolo.

So I went to march.  It was both encouraging and depressing.  Encouraging to see so many women come out and shout against the behind-closed-doors decision to deprive them of their rights (it is illegal even in cases of rape and incest to get an abortion in Oaxaca) and yet depressing to know that these women come from situations in which they could either find a way to get an abortion, or to raise a child or give one up for adoption if necessary, and that the women who are being driven further into poverty and desperation are the ones who couldn’t come to the march.  The law makes it difficult and painful for the middle classes, for those of us with the means and the time and the awareness to fight.  But for the women who live in marginalized villages with their husbands in the United States, or the women who live under tin roofs on the sides of the Cerro Fortin, well, it has screwed these women over without them ever knowing it.

We marched.  It was hot.  People leaned out of windows to see what we were doing.  We interrupted people eating breakfast in the Zócolo, tourists and wealthy locals, and some gaped and others smiled and most of them seemed fully detached from this random passing curiosity.  We marched past the ex-Palacio de Gobierno with all of its flags celebrating the mes de la patria.  We gathered and listened to speeches and finally left, hungry, and in my case with a certain heaviness, to go to the market and eat memelas.