Justyna took abortion pills to terminate a pregnancy in 2006. Poland, 2016. Laia Abril Magdalena had an abortion after discovering she was pregnant in 2014. Poland, 2016. Laia Abril

In 2006, a Polish woman named Justyna heard a rumor about a new abortion pill. The thirty-year-old mother of three was eleven weeks along in a new pregnancy, and her marriage wasn’t going well. Abortion in Poland is illegal in most circumstances, but after several weeks she was able to get the pills. She took them at home, while her kids were down the hall. She didn’t tell anyone, not even her husband; she’s now divorced. “It took me two weeks to process all the feelings, but then I felt released,” she told the Spanish photographer Laia Abril. “I feel able to make my own decisions.”

Justyna is one of a group of women whose experiences Abril documents in her photo series “On Abortion.” The first installment in a broader project titled “The History of Misogyny,” the series collects artifacts of abortion from across eras and cultures alongside the stories of women who were forced to pursue procedures outside of the law. Justyna’s portrait is shown beside an image of a packet of mifepristone, one of the drugs that she used to abort, and another showing her cell phone resting on a shag rug. She now runs a hotline that Polish women can call before taking abortion pills, to make sure they’re using them correctly. She gets about five calls a day.

Abril’s project makes clear that Justyna was one of the lucky ones. Across the world, millions of women undergo unsafe abortions each year, and tens of thousands die from complications from unsafe procedures. “On Abortion,” which is featured this month in Aperture’s On Feminism issue, begins at the Museum of Abortion and Contraception, in Vienna, where Abril found centuries-old soap syringes, fish-bladder condoms, and a glass box filled with long reeds and thorns; they were surgically removed from African women who had used them to abort. Other images show the improvised abortion tools that women described to Abril directly: rat poison, a forty-pound rock, a grapevine stalk, bundles of herbs, a clothes hanger, a steaming-hot bath, a flight of stairs. There’s the letter that a twenty-two-year-old Brazilian woman wrote to her boyfriend before an abortion, in 1928, telling him that she might not survive the procedure. (She did not.) And, from El Salvador, whose abortion ban is one of the strictest in the world, there are the fat, spiral-bound court files of the seventeen women, known as “Las 17,” who, between 1999 and 2011, were accused of having abortions and sentenced to up to forty years in prison on charges of homicide, after they lost their babies in obstetric emergencies. (Two of the women have since been freed on parole; the rest remain in prison.) The only bright colors in the series come from a sheet of Peruvian newspaper ads, selling remedies for “menstrual delay” in glaring yellow, red, and blue. The tiny ads all have the same narrow white block lettering, and pictures of unhappy female faces.

A reproduction of the bed where a nineteen-year-old woman was handcuffed while being treated after ingesting abortive pills in São Bernardo do Campo, Brazil. Laia Abril Laia Abril

Court files of the Salvadoran women known as “Las 17.” Between 1999 and 2011, they were sentenced to up to forty years in prison on charges of homicide, after they lost their babies in medical emergencies. Laia Abril Laia Abril

Abril has documented abortion both in places where it is entirely prohibited, such as Malta and Chile, and in those where it is ambiguously legal or highly regulated, like Uganda and some parts of the United States. A section of the series labelled “Death Wall” features closeups of the faces of women who died after receiving botched abortions or being denied them, including an Indian dentist living in Ireland, an Indiana teen-ager, and a college student in San Salvador who committed suicide by leaping from the roof of her dormitory. Some of the women documented in “On Abortion” are middle-aged, while others are still children: one image is an ultrasound taken from a pregnant nine-year-old girl in Nicaragua, who was forced to give birth after her father raped her.





1 / 3 Chevron Chevron Laia Abril Grapevine stalks like this one are among the instruments used for D.I.Y. abortions in India.

Lucía underwent an illegal abortion in 2003. Chile, 2016. Laia Abril Laia Abril

Cumulatively, the stories and images collected in the series make inescapably clear how abortion restrictions endanger women. But they are also testaments to endurance, showing us evidence of the lengths that women will go to retain control of their bodies and their lives even when the law stands in their way. One of the longest interviews Abril conducted was with Lucía, a Chilean woman who became pregnant after being raped at the age of twenty-four and chose to have an illegal abortion, in 2003. Chile, like El Salvador, makes no exceptions for pregnancies that result from rape or that threaten the life of the mother, and imposes jail sentences on women who are found to have had the procedure. Still, advocates estimate that between seventy thousand and a hundred and forty thousand clandestine abortions are carried out in Chile each year.

“The whole procedure turned out to be not very medical,” Lucía said, of the operation she underwent at an underground clinic. “You have to go alone and bring five hundred euros in cash.” But, in the end, she was O.K.: “Everything went well and I threw a party to celebrate with the people who helped me.” Two months later, she saw the clinic on the TV news; it had been raided by police. Lucía panicked. “I prayed they wouldn’t find any information about me,” she said. “I hadn’t just risked my life but my freedom.”