Venezuela‘s sex crisis forces women to find birth control pills via social media
Contraceptives are growing scarce
Adapted from a story by The Washington Post’s Mariana Zuñiga and Anthony Faiola.
A shortage of contraceptives has put Venezuelans in a particularly bleak quandary: Have sex — or don’t?
For the most part they are, sometimes with dire consequences.
Yorlenis Gutierrez, a 28-year-old mother, spent months vainly scouring pharmacies for a drug whose scarcity is complicating her sex life and those of countless other Venezuelans.
When she couldn’t renew her supply of birth-control pills, Gutierrez and her husband made a choice. Long-term abstinence was not an option, they agreed.
They tried to be careful, but soon she was pregnant with her second child.
“We barely eat three times a day now,” said a distraught Gutierrez, a former hair washer in a beauty salon who lost her job because of the economic crisis. “I don’t know how we’re going to feed another mouth.”
The recession
In Venezuela, a collapse in oil prices, along with nearly two decades of socialist policies, has sparked a severe recession and one of the world’s highest inflation rates. People often wait hours in line to buy bread. Prices for staples jump almost by the day. Medical shortages range from antibiotics to cancer drugs.
Pharmacies have few contraceptives to sell and often charge hundreds of times the normal price for them. Overall, stocks of oral contraceptives have fallen by as much as 90 percent since 2015, according to the Venezuelan Pharmaceutical Federation.
Many name-brand condoms, meanwhile, have disappeared from store shelves. But the cheaper brands taking their place are still imported, and therefore still unaffordable for many. A three-pack can now cost several days’ minimum-wage pay.
A macho society
In Venezuela’s macho society, many men refuse to wear condoms anyway. But now that they cost more, experts say, the indexes of unprotected sex are getting even worse.
Also, birth control usually is left up to the woman in Venezuela — and nowadays, for many, that means the black market or nothing.
The search for contraceptives
Many Venezuelan women have found a solution on social media. Facebook, Instagram and Twitter have become informal exchanges for the purchase or trading of birth-control pills, intrauterine devices and implants — albeit at black-market prices.
Other women beg friends and relations to bring them contraceptives from outside Venezuela.
“Last time, I got them from my sister-in-law, who brought them from Colombia,” said Alejandra Moran, a 27-year-old Caracas publicist. “And I’ll be traveling to Spain in December, so I’ll stock up for myself and my friends.”
For years, oral contraceptives, IUDs and condoms were available free at many public hospitals or through government programs. But the cash-strapped government has largely suspended those handouts, leaving some forms of contraception impossible to find and others prohibitively expensive.
An increase in unwanted pregnancies
There are no recent official statistics, but Venezuelan doctors are reporting spikes in unwanted pregnancies and sexually transmitted diseases that are adding to the country’s deepening misery.
The shortage, medical experts say, has also fueled an increase in dangerous attempts to terminate pregnancies at home — not a surprising development given that abortion is illegal in Venezuela except when the mother’s life is at stake.
Marissa Loretto, an OB/GYN at Caracas’s Concepción Palacios Maternity Hospital, said she recently treated a woman who had tried to induce an abortion by forcing parsley and laundry detergent into her uterus.
The young woman had arrived at the hospital bleeding, and with contractions that ultimately caused a miscarriage. As often happens in such situations, Loretto said, she subsequently suffered an infection.
“We ended up having to remove her uterus,” Loretto said.
An increase in STDs
María Eugenia Landaeta, head of infectious diseases at Caracas University Hospital, said the number of HIV patients being treated there has surged to 5,600 this year, up from 3,000 in 2014.
“One of the causes is the lack of prevention methods,” she said.
Diaz, the gynecologist from Caracas University Hospital, said the number of patients with STDs she is seeing has soared.
“In my private practice, out of every 10 patients, five or six now have an STD,” she said. “Two years ago it was just two or three.”
