Rita prevents Isabel from obtaining an abortion

Rita’s intervention in Isabel’s attempt to obtain an abortion is a formative conflict in the history shared by the two women, and its meaning changes when Isabel recounts it to Elena twenty years later. Rita acted from religious conviction and a belief that she knew what Isabel would feel; Isabel’s account exposes the cost of that certainty, describing a pregnancy imposed within an already coercive marriage and a lifelong struggle with unwanted motherhood.

The encounter and intervention

Rita found Isabel on her way back from lunch with Elena, hurrying to reach the afternoon classes at Sacred Heart Catholic School and ring the bell. Across the street, Isabel was vomiting and bent over beside a tree. The pavement’s checkerboard pattern was one Rita refused to step onto, and she initially tried to pass without looking. Her disgust gave way to an impulse she described to Elena as hearing a voice warning that Isabel was pregnant and heading somewhere to obtain an abortion. Rita turned back and offered help, first without crossing onto the pavement.

Isabel refused assistance and said she did not have far to go. Rita argued that she was too unwell to walk, then challenged her intention to end the pregnancy. Isabel insisted she did not want to become a mother and did not regard what was inside her as a child. Rita answered through religious and moral claims: she called abortion a mortal sin, urged Isabel to think of the pregnancy as a child, and predicted that she would regret ending it. Isabel rejected those claims and maintained that motherhood was not what she wanted. Their disagreement was not resolved by persuasion. When Isabel became dizzy and vomited again, Rita took her by the arm and brought her home, determined to keep her from continuing toward the abortion appointment.

At home, Rita supported the exhausted woman into a bedroom, laid her on the bed, and searched the contents of her handbag for identifying information. Elena brought a bucket and asked whether to call a doctor, but Rita focused on finding an address and a name. The bag held laboratory results confirming the pregnancy and an electric bill identifying Isabel and her address; another paper gave the name Olga. These objects made the plan Rita had interrupted concrete: Isabel had been seeking a person who could help her obtain an abortion.

The claims behind Rita’s decision

Rita tried to dissuade Isabel with claims about guilt, faith, and the emotional consequences of abortion. She argued that Isabel would hear crying and would never forget what she had done. Isabel countered that she could not live the life Rita was prescribing if she were forced to continue the pregnancy. She also rejected Rita’s invocation of God and challenged the idea that the decision belonged to anyone but herself. Rita’s intervention therefore extended beyond stopping Isabel’s journey: she treated the pregnancy as a child and motherhood as an obligation, while Isabel described it as an unwanted condition and refused the identity Rita assigned her.

Isabel’s wedding ring led Rita to ask about the father. Rita argued that he had a right to be consulted, even as Isabel said she did not care what he thought and indicated that he had already harmed her. The exchange shows that Rita’s appeal to parental authority did not take account of the danger Isabel associated with her husband. Rita’s religious certainty and concern for the unborn child prevailed over Isabel’s stated wishes and knowledge of her own circumstances.

What Isabel reveals afterward

Years later, speaking to Elena, Isabel explains that the pregnancy followed sexual violence within her marriage to Marcos. She says that the abuse continued until she became pregnant, after which he stopped touching her. The disclosure places Rita’s intervention in a wider pattern of control: Isabel had not freely chosen the circumstances of the pregnancy, and the choice Rita denied her was not the only choice being taken from her.

Isabel also recounts that a nurse connected to her husband’s clinic gave her the address for Olga after seeing her distressed. The clinic had already informed Marcos of the pregnancy through its laboratory, and when Isabel went to him with the test results to ask for help, he rejected her and used the pregnancy as a reason to keep her in the marriage. Isabel says that Marcos’s partner was involved in keeping her under control during the pregnancy. She was watched by nurses during the day and night, sedated, and treated as though she were incapable of making decisions. Her account makes clear that Rita’s intervention did not rescue her from danger: it returned her to a situation in which other people controlled her body and movements.

The pregnancy continued, and Isabel became a mother despite having said that she did not want to be one. In her later conversation with Elena, she describes the shame and guilt of feeling unable to respond to her child with the affection others expected of a mother. She recalls not wanting to touch, rock, or comfort her baby, and the pressure of a social expectation that mothers must want motherhood. This account directly contradicts Rita’s prediction that Isabel would necessarily welcome the child once she heard its heartbeat. Rita had spoken as if she knew the experience from within, but she had never been a mother herself.

Retrospective meaning

Isabel’s recollection makes the encounter a belated confrontation between the certainty of the person who intervened and the lived experience of the person whose decision was overridden. Isabel tells Elena that Rita had no personal experience of abortion, and that her warnings about lifelong guilt came from what someone else had told her. Isabel, by contrast, can speak from the experience of being made a mother against her wishes. She does not claim to know what having an abortion feels like; she insists that she knows what it feels like to be a mother who did not want motherhood.

The event also shapes Isabel’s accusation against Elena. She understands Elena’s visit as another attempt to use her body and turn her suffering into a means of settling a debt. That charge links Rita’s intervention twenty years earlier to the present encounter: both women, Isabel argues, approached her through assumptions about what she owed others. The episode thus does not settle into a simple story of rescue or religious persuasion. Rita did bring an exhausted Isabel to shelter, but she also prevented her from pursuing the choice she had made. Isabel’s later testimony restores the consequences that Rita’s account could not know, making the interrupted journey an enduring conflict over agency, belief, and the social demand that women become mothers.