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The emails arrive at an accelerating pace. Once sporadic, they now come in an incessant stream of 40, 45 or 50 per day.

Most are in Spanish or Portuguese. Others are in broken English.

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All of them express the same sentiment, the same fear, the same desperate plea.

“Help!” one email begins. “Zika in Venezuela. I need abortion!”

The emails are from mothers in Latin America who are scared of giving birth to children with microcephaly, the mysterious condition marked by an undersized head and brain damage that doctors have linked to the mosquito-born Zika virus.

Some of the women say they have already tested positive for the virus. Others say they only fear they have contracted the disease and that their child will be born disabled.

All of them are asking for something that is simple yet elusive — and generally illegal — in this part of the world: abortion pills.

In more than a thousand emails to Women on Web, a Canada-based group that provides advice and medication for women wanting an abortion in countries where it is banned, the women beg for the pills that are banned by law in their respective countries of Brazil, Colombia, Venezuela, Peru or El Salvador.