Abstract

This zine records an encounter with a story of maternal death in the Northern Peruvian Andes. SIDE A recounts how, while conducting fieldwork for a small project on the emotional trajectories of abortion in Peru, I came across the story of a 15-year-old girl who had died from complications following an illegal abortion. Moved by the fragments I heard, I decided to trace her story. Traveling from town to town, along increasingly precarious roads and transports, I eventually found her mother. SIDE B tells the girl’s story from the mother’s perspective. The word “abortion” was never spoken. Instead, other details emerged — like how much her daughter loved pineapples — that allowed to imagine the person she was and not only how she had died. This fanzine is an attempt to portray how the state and society at large remember— and forget — those who end unwanted pregnancies in a country where abortion is illegal. Through a personal story, it shows how class, ethnicity, geography, and silence come together to impose deadly sentences on women in Peru.