The young woman with the cascading curls walked into a house with no sign outside on the day she decided to get an abortion.
Inside, she says, she paid $200 (€147) for eight syringes filled with a milky liquid and a set of instructions. She spent the night in a hotel room in Mexico city, self-administering injections that made her bleed and cry out in agony.
The next day, weak and depressed, the woman was persuaded by her sister to see a doctor, who determined that she had undergone an incomplete abortion.
He conducted an emergency procedure to complete the abortion and stave off infection.
"What have I done?" she remembers thinking. "I risked my life."
Tens of thousands of women like her undergo illegal abortions in Mexico each year and are at the nexus of a furious debate gripping this nation. In Mexico abortion is allowed only in limited cases, including rape and when the mother's life is in danger.
Abortion opponents cite such cases as evidence that abortion should be more curtailed, whereas abortion rights advocates argue that the procedure should be decriminalised so that women have access to safe abortions.
The debate has been ignited by two proposals to expand access to abortions in this overwhelmingly Catholic country, considered a regional trendsetter on social issues. Mexico city's legislature is widely expected to approve a law today that would decriminalise abortion and allow the procedure during the first 12 weeks of pregnancy. A similar proposal is before the Mexican congress.
On one side of the argument are feminists and the left-leaning politicians who have strengthened their control of Mexico city's government. On the other side is the Catholic Church, which failed to stop legalisation of gay civil unions in Mexico city and the northern state of Coahuila in recent months.
"The Catholic Church has lost a lot of influence as Mexicans have become more aware of their rights as citizens, and not just their rights as baptised Catholics," said Mario Canseco, who grew up in Mexico city and is global studies director at Angus Reid Global Monitor, a research group that tracks public opinion.
"The church, especially the rural priests, once dominated when it came to social decisions, but that's not the case anymore."
The topic of abortion has been the focus of frequent Sunday sermons and media attention in Mexico city for weeks. Church leaders have threatened to excommunicate Catholic lawmakers who vote to expand access to abortion.
A leading abortion opponent, Jorge Serrano Limón, has called Mexico city mayor Marcelo Ebrard, who supports the abortion proposal, a fascist.
A number of abortion fights are playing out across Latin America, where Cuba and Guyana are the only countries that allow unfettered access to the procedure.
Nicaragua's supreme court recently agreed to hear an appeal of an abortion ban passed last year. The first legal abortion in Colombia was performed in August.
Meanwhile, suggestions of expanding access to abortion have been met unfavourably in Brazil, the only country with more Catholics than Mexico. A March poll showed that just 10 per cent of Brazilians want the procedure decriminalised.
Much as in the US in the 1960s, in Mexico it is the state legislatures that have become abortion flashpoints. Abortion rights advocates scored their biggest victory in 2000 in the state of Yucatán, northwest of Cancún. Yucatán now allows abortions for women who already have three children and can prove that they cannot afford another child.
All Mexican states permit abortions for rape victims, though a study by Human Rights Watch found that local officials frequently find ways to deny the procedures.
The proposed law in Mexico city, which is a federal district and functions much like a state, is potentially broader than the law in Yucatán.
The measure would permit abortions in the first trimester of pregnancy if having a child would be "incompatible" with a woman's "life project", a standard that could allow abortions for pregnant women who don't want to interrupt school or work. It is backed by the Democratic Revolutionary Party, or PRD, which holds a large majority in the city legislature.
The national legislation, also sponsored by the PRD, faces a more difficult challenge because the ruling National Action Party, or PAN, staunchly opposes abortion.
The president, Felipe Calderón, said in an interview last month he would oppose changes.
The church has mounted an aggressive campaign against the abortion proposals. Led by the church hierarchy, thousands of demonstrators waved banners earlier this month decrying "a culture of death" while marching to Mexico city's Basilica de Guadalupe, one of the Catholic world's holiest shrines. The Vatican also dispatched its top anti-abortion campaigner, Cardinal Alfonso López Trujillo, to Mexico city.
Mexico's highest-ranking Catholic, Cardinal Norberto Rivera, has repeatedly criticised the abortion proposals during sermons and described abortion as "an abominable crime".
Mexico outlawed abortion in 1931. But it created two exceptions, allowing abortions for rape victims and establishing the vague standard of legal abortions for women who become pregnant through their own "negligence".
The law did not set a cut-off date for the procedure, meaning women who meet one of those criteria can have abortions at any time, even eight months into a pregnancy.
There are few abortion prosecutions in Mexico, where a university study estimated there are one million abortions a year. The rich either go to the US for the operation or to private clinics in Mexico, where their doctors are the sole judges of whether the procedure fits the parameters of the law. The poor, who can seldom get abortions at public hospitals, go to what critics refer to as back-alley "charlatans" who openly advertise their services.
"Abortion has been privatised in Mexico," Sen Pablo Gómez, sponsor of the national abortion proposal, said in an interview. "It's a bad joke."
Abortion rights activists say there are as many as 3,000 deaths in Mexico each year due to botched abortions, making it the fifth-leading cause of death among women. As many as 10,000 women are hospitalised because of complications from abortions, the activists say.
- (LA Times-Washington Post service)