Romina (not her real name) was 14 when she found out she was pregnant. It was the fall of last year. She had a boyfriend. Serious enough that she and her mother had talked about her starting on birth control. But at the doctor’s appointment she attended to begin taking contraception, a test revealed she was pregnant.
“I felt very scared,” Romina recalls in an interview for Glamour given alongside her mother, and with her mother’s permission. “I didn’t know how I was going to tell my mom, but I had to. We both started to cry in the doctor’s office. I asked her for forgiveness and she said it was okay and that we would figure out what to do.”
But Romina and her mother live in a Southern state where abortion is now illegal. Solutions are not within easy reach—especially for a family like hers, whose financial situation is precarious. Nevertheless, Romina felt certain she didn’t want to become a mother. “I knew I couldn’t keep it. I mean, I can’t even take care of myself. How was I going to take care of a baby? I’m young. It would ruin my life. I am just starting to live.”
The harrowing bind Romina found herself in forms the subject of a new short film by director, activist, and author Paola Mendoza. Animated to protect the family’s anonymity, it tells both Romina’s story and that of the people—Mendoza included—who came together to help a 14-year-old girl get the abortion she wanted and needed.
Watch the film by Paola Mendoza here.
Mendoza, who has known the family for a long time, was one of the first to find out about Romina’s pregnancy. “Both of them were very clear from the beginning that they did not want to continue the pregnancy. I happened to know how to deal with this. And so we were able to get her to New York City within five days after they found out she was pregnant.”
While Romina’s abortion happened in the fall, it was only in January of this year—with the permission of Romina and her mother—that Mendoza began to explore retelling her story, “because it’s so important and powerful.”
“To this day, I feel so much rage at the injustice of laws that are implemented by mostly men and how it affects real people, real girls in this scenario,” Mendoza says. “And the impotence that I felt in that moment of knowing that I was going to help this one child, but there are thousands upon thousands of Rominas in this country. And they don’t have just random luck to know someone that can get them across state lines, raise the tremendous amount of money that it took to get her here and pay for everything—it was a few thousand dollars—and get her safely back home. And understanding the legal realities of that as well.”
The illegality of abortion in the state that Romina is from was of huge concern to Romina’s mother. It’s the reason the film obscures identifying details about the family. It’s the reason Romina and her mother only felt safe speaking to Glamour via Mendoza—one of the very few people to know the family’s identity. Very real fears exist for those seeking abortion care in states where terminations are banned or severely restricted. Similar concerns abound for those who help people in need. Mendoza says, “Laws are changing all the time in states that have abortion bans, which is scary and uncertain. But it’s extraordinarily important for people to see what we are willing to do to help people get the abortions they need.”
Romina’s mother, who was “crushed when I found out the news” about her daughter’s pregnancy, recalls: “The doctor told me we couldn’t have an abortion in our state because it was illegal. I felt as if the world was crashing in on me. I couldn’t believe it.”
Her first thoughts for her daughter were: She is a child. She is studying. How was she going to take care of a baby? A girl taking care of a baby?
But even though Romina’s mother wanted to support her daughter—and Romina herself felt strongly that she had every right to end her unwanted pregnancy: “It’s my life. It’s my body. I need to make the decision that I want to make,” she says—Mendoza recalls the agony the family faced, as immigrants, choosing to do something that was illegal in their home state.
“You are afraid that the state can come in and take you away,” says Mendoza. “You do everything as an immigrant to be on the right side of the law. And so it added an extra layer of fear to know that her home state made abortion a crime, even though legally she could get and even take abortion pills. The intentionally complex nature of the laws in her state did what they were meant to do, cause fear and uncertainty and ultimately stop her and people from exercising the rights they do have.
“For me, it was very important for them to understand that even though the state that they live in didn’t allow her to have an abortion, what she was doing was fine. She had the right to make this choice.”
Mendoza’s film goes on to follow the journey Romina makes to New York with her mother—who then must leave her daughter in the care of Mendoza because she has to return home to care for her other children—and Romina and Mendoza’s experience of going through the termination together. One that is as heartwrenching as it is enraging: the enormity of a 14 year old girl going through an abortion, made `0 times worse by the enforced separation of a daughter from her mother.
Romina, who is telling her story herself for the first time, says: “I was really scared. I’d never been away from my mom in my entire life. I felt really alone and scared, but I knew I had to do this.”
“How can I explain this? I am mad,” says Romina’s mother. “I’m mad because of the laws in my state. If we didn’t have these laws, we wouldn’t have had to travel to NYC, everything would have been much much easier.
“Saying goodbye to her at the airport I was crying. I’d never been apart from her. She had to go and do this without me, the very first time we would be apart, and the truth is I was so, so sad to be away from her. I kept crying, but we had to do this."
The responsibility of caring for another woman’s child weighed heavily on Mendoza, too, and you feel this throughout the film. How Mendoza stays up all night with Romina after Romina takes the abortion pills. How an army of her friends come together to support a young girl who was on the precipice of adulthood but still very much a child—like so many 14-year-olds.
“At times she just wanted her mom,” Mendoza recalls, “and she was in pain because she was cramping. She called her mom, and wanted her mom, and at the same time was texting with her friends.”
For Mendoza, and Romina, and Romina’s mother, what got them through it together was community. On the night of the abortion itself, Mendoza says that Romina asked to watch movies with the people who had come over to support her. Romina says: “I actually liked NYC. It was nice to have all those people around. I am really grateful to everyone that helped me. I am not sure why they helped me, but I really am grateful.”
It’s important not to misconstrue the youthfulness of Romina’s expressions—remember, she is still not even 16—for anything like a blasé attitude. She is clear-eyed about the toll her abortion took on her, and about having an already awful situation compounded by the inability to seek care in her home state.
“Honestly, it was really hard. It was hard on my body. I feel good because it was the right decision and my body is totally fine now. Bad because it was hard to do, because I had to leave my house and my mom.”
However, it is her final words, spoken by a teenager but which apply to us all, to which lawmakers must pay the most attention: “I needed to do it,” Romina says, “because it was what was best for me.”
Watch the film by Paola Mendoza here.
Paola Mendoza is a film director, activist, author of Together We Rise, Sanctuary and the forthcoming book Solis, and is a cofounder of the Women’s March and The Meteor. She has written for The New York Times, Huffington Post, Glamour, Elle, and InStyle.
