"I had never seen a public hospital like that in Guadalajara," she said. "All the people in Mexico City gave me a lot of support. The person who did my tests, the nurses, the social workers, the psychologist -- five or six people attended to me."
Back in Guadalajara, her choices had seemed limited. Medeles remembered a 16-year-old classmate who bled to death at home after having an illegal abortion. "My friends in the barrio were telling me to go ahead and have the baby, that abortion would be worse," she said.
But her friends at the university where she takes high school equivalency classes said abortion was a better choice. "They even gave me money so I could go to Mexico City," she said.
Medeles came to Mexico City after her sister found the phone number for Catholic Women for the Right to Choose.
The Catholic women's group got Medeles a hospital appointment in Mexico City. She made four visits to a city clinic over the course of seven days, meeting a few other women undergoing the same procedure.
One was a 14-year-old girl who also feared death. "I got to know her, and afterward we talked and everything went fine with her abortion," Medeles said.
Another was a very poor woman not much older than Medeles, but with five children. "Her face was battered and bruised," Medeles recalled. "She didn't want any more children."
On Medeles' final visit, she met with a staff psychologist. Among other things, the psychologist wanted to know whether she had had any dreams with images of death. Medeles answered that she had not.
"I'm very thankful to them," Medeles said. "They didn't charge me one peso. . . . If any friend asks me for advice, I'd tell them to go to Mexico City because it went well for me. And you don't run any risks."
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hector.tobar@latimes.com
Cecilia Sanchez and Maria Antonieta Uribe of The Times' Mexico City Bureau contributed to this report.
