Unwanted pregnancy

Isabel Mansilla’s unwanted pregnancy is both the consequence of sexual violence and the center of a struggle over who may decide what happens to her body. The novel first shows Rita intervening to prevent Isabel from seeking an abortion, then returns to the encounter through Isabel’s account to Elena. That account reveals the coercion surrounding the pregnancy and challenges the certainty with which Rita had once imposed motherhood as a moral duty.

Discovery and intervention

Twenty years before Elena’s visit to Isabel, Rita found her vomiting by the roadside while hurrying to work at Sacred Heart Catholic School. Isabel was holding a paper with an address and the name Olga, intending to go to a place where she could obtain an abortion. Rita initially recoiled from the sight, but stopped, offered help, and argued with Isabel as she continued to be sick. Isabel said she did not want to be a mother and did not regard what was inside her as a child; Rita insisted that the pregnancy made her a mother already and invoked the sin of abortion and the life she believed Isabel carried.

Rita’s intervention was not simply an argument. When Isabel was exhausted and dizzy, Rita took her by the arm and brought her to Elena’s house, despite Isabel’s resistance. There she searched Isabel’s handbag for identifying information. The bag contained laboratory results confirming the pregnancy and an electricity bill addressed to Isabel Guerte de Mansilla, which gave Rita her name and address. Elena, who had been knitting at home, witnessed Rita bring the distressed woman in and ask for a bucket in case she vomited again. The pregnancy thus entered the family’s life through a rescue Rita understood as morally necessary, but which also overrode Isabel’s expressed refusal.

The circumstances behind the pregnancy

When Isabel later explains the pregnancy to Elena, she distinguishes what she had thought before becoming pregnant from what she knew once the test came back positive. Before the pregnancy, her position had been an abstract decision. Confronted with the result, she says, she knew that she did not want to continue it. Her account directly contests the premise on which Rita acted: that a pregnant woman must understand herself as a mother and accept that identity.

Isabel describes her marriage to Marcos as lacking love and says that their first sexual encounter, three months after the wedding, was forced. She recalls that he continued to force sex until she became pregnant, after which he did not touch her again. She also says that Marcos’s male partner was present during the assault, though she did not see him, and that he helped Marcos keep her under control during the pregnancy. This history makes clear that the pregnancy did not arise from a freely chosen relationship. Isabel had been seeking an abortion after learning she was pregnant, while the circumstances in which she became pregnant involved violence and the denial of her control over her body.

Confinement and institutional power

Isabel recounts that Marcos and his partner kept her almost like a prisoner for the nine months of the pregnancy. She was sedated and watched by nurses, one during the day and another at night. The care presented around her did not amount to freedom: other people managed her circumstances while she was deprived of the ability to determine whether she would remain pregnant. Isabel says she let them take charge, describing herself as someone who had never been strong and who lost the strength she had gathered on the day Rita found her.

Her account also traces how she came to seek an abortion. After Isabel received the positive test result, she went to Marcos to tell him she did not want a child. He already knew about the pregnancy, Isabel says, because someone at the laboratory had informed him. He slapped her, told her he was ashamed of her, and said he would divorce her if she were not pregnant. A nurse from his clinic later approached Isabel in the hall, where she had sat down because she could not walk, and slipped her the address and name Olga. Isabel followed that lead until Rita stopped her. The sequence links private violence to a medical setting in which information about Isabel’s pregnancy reached her husband, while the one person who offered a route to an abortion did so covertly.

Competing accounts of motherhood and knowledge

Rita had treated the pregnancy as proof that Isabel was already a mother and that abortion was not her decision to make. In retrospect, the contradiction is stark: Rita, who was not a mother and would never be one, compelled another woman to continue a pregnancy by applying religious dogma to her body. The novel does not present Isabel’s later motherhood as proof that Rita was right. Instead, Isabel’s account places the imposed pregnancy alongside her stated refusal and the violence and confinement that shaped it.

During her conversation with Elena, Isabel uses her experience to question Elena’s certainty that Rita could never have chosen to die by suicide. Isabel says that before pregnancy she could only imagine what she might do; bodily experience changed what she knew. Elena recognizes a parallel with her own Parkinson’s disease: descriptions could not give her the knowledge that came when illness was inside her body. That comparison does not make the experiences equivalent, but it clarifies the limits of judgment made at a distance. Isabel’s history also unsettles Elena’s assumption that a mother necessarily knows her daughter. The pregnancy remains central not only as a past event in Isabel’s life, but as the history that gives her grounds to challenge what Elena believes she can know about Rita.