Bananas

Off Our Backs, Mar/Apr 2004 by Moody, Maryam

Even having a Pap smear as infrequently as every five years can significantly reduce a woman's chance of developing cervical cancer. However, many of the women we saw had never had the test, or had had it once or twice in their lives. In the absence of consistent and reliable screenings, the best prevention is to reduce the transmission of HPV. For our presentation, we chose to encourage sexually active young people to limit the number of their sexual partners and to use contraception, especially barrier methods such as condoms.

Hence, the bananas. In the morning we had sacrificed a bunch of healthy-looking bananas for the cause, passed out a handful of expired condoms, and encouraged the teenagers to practice. No pressure! Each completed banana was held up and critiqued: enough room in the tip? Rolled down all the way? We were ruthless. Afterwards, I washed the models in the clinic's tiny sink and dried them as best I could with toilet paper. At the second school, the students fidgeted awkwardly in the heat as we droned on about the menstrual cycle and showed them pictures of sexually transmitted infections.

I scanned the faces of the female students. El Salvador has the second most restrictive abortion laws in the world. Recently, the penal code was changed to outlaw abortion under any circumstance, including rape, incest, and sex with a minor, abortion to save the mother's life or to terminate a seriously deformed fetus. Today, any person who had anything to do with the abortion can be penalized: the woman, the abortion provider, anyone who provided financial support or encouraged the woman to seek the abortion, and even someone who unintentionally causes an abortion. This means that a pharmacist who provides the antiulcer drug Cytotec (misoprostol) to a person who uses it as an abortifacient can be prosecuted. Sentences for doctors range between six and twelve years in prison, and the woman receives two to eight.

Standing there, reading about el ciclo menstrual into the microphone and squirting spermicide into a diaphragm, I realized it didn't matter which contraceptive I thought was most or least invasive from a radical feminist point of view or what the latest studies were about the connection between breast cancer and the pill. It didn't matter because the point of this whole show was to educate for the prevention of illegal abortions. In a country where "a woman's right to choose" doesn't exist, our purpose was to prevent her having to choosebetween bearing an unwanted child and the possibility of losing her life.

My eyes felt mighty wide. Sure, I had known we wouldn't be able to drink the water and I was prepared for guys with guns and I had some vague idea of poverty from trips abroad and TV documentaries and classes in school, but I didn't know. I had tried hard not to bring any expectations, so I just wasn't prepared - for parasites, illiteracy, open-air wards at the hospital.

This sounds so naive, but I just didn't understand in my bones that people really live year-round in tin roof shacks on cobblestone streets filled with dirt and trash and mangy dogs. That they're still there now, as I sit here in below-zero Massachusetts-still walking around selling platanos and pan dulce from baskets on their heads, and kids are still coughing and parasites are crawling up through their bare feet. But at least we have done something concrete and preventative: there are perhaps dozens of women whose pre-cancerous dysplasia will be detected by the lab, and when Dr. Cremer and her team return to treat them in March, we will have done something.