Mexican Website Teaches How to Perform Chemical Abortions at Home

A new interactive web page appears designed to teach women in Mexico how to perform a chemical abortion at home.

The website is in Spanish and features a Mexican woman as the main character; its domain is registered to an owner located in Mexico’s capital. The goal of the site is to teach women how to use one of the drugs that makes up an RU-486 chemical abortion at home. RH Reality Check describes the webpage as a “Choose Your Own Adventure stylegame.”

¿No Te Baja? which translates as Missed Your Period?makes use of bright colors, engaging cartoon characters and relatable,non-technical, language to inform and guide users through the steps theycan take to terminate a pregnancy using Misoprostol. The website takesthe form of an interactive, Choose Your Own Adventure stylegame, where users click through to different scenarios that changeaccording to their own personal situation and decisions.

The story goes on to note that Misoprostol is widely available in Mexico, commonly used to treat ulcers. One does not need a prescription to purchase it, but inducing a chemical abortion with the drug requires specific steps, which the website seeks to reveal.

Abortion is legal up to 12 weeks in Mexico City but not in other Mexican states. The danger in using the drug, according to Life News, is that Misoprostol “does not induce an abortion in a significant percentage of women and hasbeen associated with a high number of developmental anomalies amongthose children who do survive.” These risks are not mentioned in the RH Reality Check story.