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In September 1977, Rosaura Jimenez, a twenty-seven-year-old Mexican American single mother in McAllen, Texas, went to the home of Maria Pineda for a surgical abortion. Pineda, a midwife, was licensed to deliver babies but not to perform abortions. After the procedure Jimenez developed sepsis; several days later she died of organ failure in the McAllen General Hospital. Her death would have been common and unremarkable a decade earlier, but since the Supreme Court’s 1973 Roe v. Wade decision, abortion had become legal and widely available in hospitals, clinics, and doctors’ offices across the United States. Jimenez had initially wanted a legal abortion and returned to a physician who had given her one eight months earlier, paid for by Medicaid. But in August the Hyde Amendment had gone into effect after the Supreme Court had judged it constitutional. Passed by Congress in the previous session, the amendment banned the use of federal funds for abortions and led states to restrict their funding of Medicaid as well. In McAllen Jimenez had been rebuffed by the physician, who said he would not be reimbursed, although she could find and pay for an abortion herself. Jimenez had a financial aid check in her purse to pay for her college classes (she was studying to become a special education teacher), but she chose access to education over access to legal reproductive care. After first traveling to Mexico where she received a cheaper but ineffective “hormone injection” from a pharmacy there, she sought Pineda’s aid.1
Jimenez was quickly described as the first victim of the Hyde Amendment, a symbol that inspired rallies and candlelight vigils outside the state legislature in Texas and across the country. Eager to make this tragedy a potent lesson about the danger of antiabortion politics that could threaten the lives of every woman, feminist and Village Voice journalist Ellen Frankfort along with Frances Kissling, the director of the National Abortion Federation, came to McAllen in 1978. They believed that this death could become an issue that would unite feminists across class and race.2 Frankfort and Kissling, along with two of Jimenez’s friends, organized a sting operation to try to bring Pineda to justice. Setting up one woman with a wire and having Diana Rivera,...