Rita intervenes in Isabel’s decision to have an abortion

Rita’s intervention in Isabel’s decision to have an abortion is a decisive act of reproductive coercion: believing she is saving a child, Rita overrides Isabel’s stated refusal of motherhood and takes her away from the place where she had sought help. The episode’s later retelling overturns Rita’s moral certainty by revealing that Isabel’s pregnancy followed sexual violence and that the woman Rita compelled to continue it was already living under her husband’s control.

The encounter

Twenty years before Elena visits Isabel, Rita finds her while returning from lunch with her mother and hurrying back to the Catholic school where she works. Isabel is across the street, bent over and vomiting, with a paper bearing an address and the name Olga. She is trying to reach someone who can help her end the pregnancy. Rita initially recoils from the sight and speeds up, but then stops. She offers assistance without stepping onto the pavement, in keeping with a taboo she observes there, and persists when Isabel says she does not need help.

Rita tells Elena that she heard an inner voice warning that Isabel was pregnant and about to enter the place. That conviction changes her response: instead of continuing on to ring the bell for the afternoon classes, she turns back and confronts Isabel. Isabel is dizzy and repeatedly sick; Rita reads her distress not as a reason to leave her decision alone, but as evidence that she should intervene. When Isabel refuses to go with her, Rita takes her by the arm and brings her home. Isabel is exhausted, and Rita is determined.

The argument over motherhood

Rita appeals to religious doctrine, the life inside Isabel, and the guilt she predicts Isabel will feel. She insists that Isabel will want the pregnancy once she hears a heartbeat and argues that abortion is a mortal sin. Isabel answers that she does not believe in God, does not want to be a mother, and does not regard what is inside her as a child. She also tells Rita that she is an innocent person herself and that she will not be able to live if she is forced to continue the pregnancy. Rita counters that the decision is not Isabel’s alone and invokes the father’s right to a say.

When Rita notices Isabel’s wedding ring, she asks whether she is married and presses the point that there is a father. Isabel’s response that he has already harmed her is a warning whose meaning becomes clearer only years later. Rita nevertheless continues to argue through the framework she trusts: she tells Isabel to think of the child, predicts lasting remorse, and insists that she already is a mother. Isabel’s objections do not alter Rita’s course. The confrontation ends not with agreement but with Rita removing Isabel from the route she had chosen.

What Isabel later reveals

During Elena’s visit, Isabel recalls that Rita had told her she would hear a baby crying in her head if she had an abortion. Isabel objects that Rita had no experience of abortion and was repeating what someone else had taught her. She contrasts that borrowed certainty with her own knowledge of unwanted motherhood: she describes the shame and guilt of not wanting to care for her baby, and the pressure of a world that insists mothers must want motherhood. By then, the child is Julieta, and the consequences of Rita’s intervention are not a moral prediction but Isabel’s lived history.

Isabel also explains that her pregnancy began in sexual violence by her husband, Marcos. His companion was present during the assault and, Isabel believes, helped Marcos force her to comply. After a nurse gave her the address and name of Olga, Isabel went to Marcos with the test results and asked him for help ending the pregnancy. He rejected and humiliated her. During the pregnancy, he and his companion kept her under close control, with nurses watching over her day and night; Isabel says she was treated almost like a prisoner. These disclosures recast Rita’s rescue: Rita took Isabel away from the person and place she had chosen to seek help, then returned her to a home where her autonomy was already constrained.

Consequences and significance

The intervention binds Rita and Isabel across two decades, but not as an uncomplicated act of kindness. When Isabel confronts Elena, she says that Rita treated her body as if it belonged to someone else, and that Elena has come to repeat that violation by seeking something from her. Isabel’s account makes the central conflict more specific than a disagreement over religious belief: Rita’s certainty about what a mother should do became power over another woman’s body, while Isabel bore the lasting consequences of a pregnancy she had not wanted.

The episode also complicates Rita’s position. She acted from a conviction that she was protecting life, but she imposed motherhood on another woman while never becoming a mother herself. Isabel, by contrast, speaks from the experience Rita claimed to know in advance. Their opposing claims—Rita’s insistence that Isabel would regret refusing motherhood, and Isabel’s testimony to the suffering of being made a mother—give the intervention its enduring force. The later revelation of Marcos’s violence and the confinement during pregnancy shows how religious pressure, marital power, and medical authority converged around Isabel, narrowing the choices available to her.