Global Women's Voices: Share Personal Stories

Sarah, Bolivia

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As a junior in high school in September 1996, I traveled to Bolivia as a translator with a group of women doctors and nurses. Our intent was to give desperately needed healthcare to women in prison. In Bolivia, when women are put in jail more often than not their children are also placed there with them.

Unfortunately, the government retracted its permission for us to enter the jail at the last moment. Instead we ended up in a small village in the altiplano of Bolivia. The lack of basic reproductive education in the area where we were was astounding. As a sixteen year old I knew more about reproductive health than the mothers and grandmothers I met. The experience filled me with the desire to do more, but what?

Two years later after my high school graduation I traveled once more to La Paz, Bolivia to work as a volunteer at a women’s social project, Unidad y Esperanza, in a poverty-stricken area of the capital city. Once again the lack of knowledge on reproductive health astounded me. In a country where less than one percent of women use oral contraceptives, the unwanted birthrate is huge.

Abortion is also illegal and many women we worked with had risked their lives various times with unsanitary abortions. The use of IUD’s is also extremely low, and in the majority of cases women refused to consider them without their husband’s/partner’s permission. Many Bolivian men hold the idea that birth-control pills and IUD’s allow “their” women to be promiscuous.

I will graduate from college in May. My husband is a Bolivian doctor and together we hope to return to Bolivia and to someday start a women’s clinic as well as a home for abandoned children. In this way we hope to be able to contribute towards the education of women about their reproductive health as well as their reproductive rights.

updated: 7/2/2004