Rita talks Isabel out of an abortion

Rita talks Isabel out of an abortion is a remembered episode from twenty years before Elena visits Isabel. Rita finds Isabel on the way to an abortion appointment and, invoking Catholic teaching, refuses to accept her decision. She brings Isabel to Elena’s home and then arranges their journey elsewhere. The encounter establishes both Rita’s forceful intervention and its cost: Isabel’s later account makes clear that Rita’s act of compelling motherhood took place within a pregnancy already imposed through violence and control.

Encounter on the way to the appointment

Rita came across Isabel while returning from her daily lunch with Elena and hurrying toward the Catholic school where she worked. She was supposed to ring the bell marking the start of afternoon classes. Instead, across the street, she saw Isabel leaning against a tree and vomiting. Isabel had an address on a piece of paper and was trying to reach Olga, the person she intended to see about ending the pregnancy. Rita initially felt disgust and tried not to look, but stopped and offered help without stepping onto the checkerboard pavement she avoided.

Isabel refused assistance and said she did not have far to go. Rita persisted, warning her that she could not manage the journey in her condition. Isabel insisted that she did not want to become a mother and did not regard what she carried as a child. Rita countered with a religious and moral argument: she described the pregnancy as a life with a heartbeat, invoked sin and future guilt, and said Isabel would come to want the child. When Isabel challenged her authority to decide, Rita maintained that the decision was not Isabel’s alone. The exchange was not a negotiation between equals; Rita’s certainty steadily displaced Isabel’s clearly expressed refusal.

Rita takes Isabel to Elena’s house

During the argument Rita noticed Isabel’s wedding ring and asked whether she was married. She then invoked the husband’s place in the decision and warned that he might kill Isabel if he learned what she planned. Isabel’s reply suggested that he had already harmed her, though Rita did not understand the full history at the time. Rita also appealed to God’s will and insisted that Isabel name the pregnancy as a child. The narrative shows her applying Catholic doctrine to another woman’s body, even as Isabel repeatedly rejected the identity of mother that Rita assigned to her.

Isabel became dizzy and exhausted, and Rita took her by the arm and brought her away from the appointment. At home, Rita explained the encounter to Elena, who had been knitting beside the heater. Elena asked who the woman was and whether she should call a doctor, but Rita focused instead on locating an address. She emptied Isabel’s handbag onto the bed and searched among its contents. One envelope held laboratory results confirming the pregnancy; another, an electricity bill, gave Isabel’s name and address. Rita read the unfamiliar street name, Soldado de la Independencia, twice. The episode briefly dwells on the strangeness of a street named for an anonymous person, a detail that contrasts with the women’s more immediate struggle over who has the power to define Isabel’s situation.

Rita left Isabel in the bedroom and ordered Elena to change, then went to the train station, which twenty years earlier was the town’s only taxi rank. After finding a taxi, she returned to collect Isabel. Elena helped Rita lead her outside. Rita gave the driver the address through the open window, put Isabel in the back seat, and had Elena sit beside her before joining them. Her stated concern was that Isabel might try to escape the car and kill herself and the child. The arrangement protected the pregnancy from Isabel’s own decision rather than providing the assistance she had sought.

The journey and its immediate consequence

The taxi carried all three women past the place where Rita and Isabel had met: the black-and-white checkerboard pavement outside Olga’s. Isabel continued to insist that there was no child, clenching her fists as she sat between Rita and Elena. Rita and Elena ignored her. The route thus returned them to the site of Isabel’s intended appointment, but the direction of travel had been reversed: instead of reaching the person she sought, Isabel was being taken away from that possibility by Rita’s determination and Elena’s assistance.

Rita’s intervention did not end with persuasion. She had brought Isabel to her own home, searched her belongings, and arranged transport while Isabel remained opposed. Elena’s participation was quieter: she helped Rita lead Isabel to the taxi and sat with them during the journey. The later account does not present the two women’s actions as equivalent in force, but it establishes that Elena was present and that Isabel’s refusal was audible to both of them.

Later revelations and significance

When Isabel recounts the episode years later, she explains that her pregnancy followed sexual violence by her husband, Marcos. She says that another man, his companion and Julieta’s godfather, was also present on the night she was assaulted and later helped keep her under control. During the pregnancy, Isabel was sedated and watched by nurses, and she describes herself as having been kept almost like a prisoner. Her husband had learned of the pregnancy through information from the medical field before she could decide what to do. These disclosures alter the meaning of Rita’s earlier warning about the husband: Isabel’s brief response had referred to harm already done, not merely a danger she might face in the future.

Isabel also tells Elena that the strength she had mustered in seeking an abortion disappeared after Rita brought her home. Her account makes the episode consequential beyond its immediate outcome: Rita’s intervention helped ensure that Isabel continued the pregnancy, while the circumstances of that pregnancy involved coercion by her husband and others. The narrative places religious conviction beside the material power of marriage, medical access, and confinement, rather than treating Isabel’s choice as an abstract moral dispute.

The episode also sharpens the contradiction in Rita’s position. Rita, who was not a mother and would never become one, insisted that Isabel already was a mother and overrode her refusal. The narration presents this as dogma imposed on another woman’s body, not as a simple act of rescue. Later, Isabel’s account of her own experience offers a counterpoint to Rita’s certainty: Rita believed she knew what motherhood required, while Isabel knew the consequences of being denied the choice. That conflict becomes part of the history Elena must hear as she tries to understand her daughter’s actions and the limits of what she believed she knew.