An interview gone BLEAH.

"I've been watching you," she says the moment I approached her. Her blood-colored lipstick is wearing out, revealing colorless lips from the inside. "You've been walking around in circles all afternoon. Didn't you hear me calling you a while ago?"

This is the fifth abortionist I'm attempting to interview in the black market surrounding Quiapo Church. She is fat and squat, with the frizzy hair of someone who's undergone an electric shock.

The first time I attempted to interview an abortionist she said, "No." And that was the end of the conversation.

The second time I attempted to interview another abortionist I said I'm a student from UP Diliman and may I interview her, please? "No." And that was the end of the conversation.

On the third time I approached an abortionist I pretended to be interested in her products, asking, "Ooohhh! What's this sort of vegetable do?" The moment she finished talking I asked if I could get an interview for just ten minutes tops with a timer on my hand, please. "No," she said. And that was the end of the conversation.

The fourth time I approached another abortionist, I bribed her with a hundred pesos for a fifteen-minute interview and she said, "No." Three hundred! "No." Four hundred! Four hundred pesos! "No." Five hundred! God damn it! I'll give you five hundred pesos! She paused and marshaled her thoughts. "No." And that was the end of the conversation.

Now on my fifth, I have to resort to strategies that will test my substandard theatrical skills which includes feigning shyness, meekness, and fear of the Lord.

"I'm sorry," I say to her, "but you must've mistaken me for someone else."

But yes, that was me. Of the estimated thirty stalls of "pamparegla" fencing the Quiapo Church, all the women vendors of abortificients would lure you smiling with their eyes, drawing you with a hand to come and join their league of sinners. There's something sinister by the way they look. It's as if they're surrounded by this heavy, demonic aura, or like some invisible horned devil is puppeteering them.

"Ah, yes. It could be someone else," she says. "There's so many women here they all look the same. Pamparegla?"

What a clever way to euphemize abortion. Each stall has a sign of this "pamparegla", and they all sell the same merchandise: herbs, roots, incense, bottles of oil, and rocks of different colors and opacity. Where we're at is behind Quiapo Church, a few paces away from the Monument for Children. The Monument includes a giant statue of Jesus' wounded hands, the left hand cradling a baby, the right protecting the baby. The hole on Jesus' right hand unwittingly resembles a vulva.

I fib I'm three months pregnant by a married man.

"You wouldn't say," she says regrettably. "Your stomach doesn't show though." Her eyes turn from my stomach to my breasts. "But your breasts. I can tell it by your breasts."

"My breasts are getting firmer and heavier," I say, looking at my own twins naturally cup-sized C. "Do you have anything I could drink maybe, to flush this thing out?" I pick out a small vial of oil with snake skin inside.

Quiapo Church is a paradox. Outside are a parade of abortionists offering a quick fix for unwanted babies. Inside, oversexed women drop on their knees praying to have a baby, please, Dear God Almighty. Contraceptives never occurred to women who want an abortion. Consulting a gynecologist never occurred to women who want to have a baby. At this age of fast food and automated teller machines, everybody wants it quick, cheap, and easy. Miracles for abortion, miracles for fertility, women go to Quiapo Church for both.

She tells me my options. She has oils and ointments you can lather on your abdomen. She has herbs and tablets. For herbs you'll need three sachets of some dried leaves which you'll grind and insert in your recreation orifice three times for a day, P150 each. "Just lie down and wait for about twenty minutes," she says, "and then you'll menstruate in clumps."

As she says this, the posters from the church's bulletin board riffle through my head. Flash: an image of an eight month embryo wrapped in a snot-like membrane. The caption says , "Save me! Stop abortion!"

But if you want it more effective, she offers Cytotec.

Flash: aborted embryos looking like ground uncooked toccino.

Cytotec is a prescription drug for ulcers. Before it was banned, it cost only P20 over the counter. Here in Quiapo's black market it costs P70 to P150.

You'll be needing six tablets for P100 each. At 9 in the evening, insert one into your sex hole and drink another of the same tablet, coupled with an herbal capsule to ease the pain. At midnight, you drink one tablet of Cytotec and one capsule of the herbal medicine. Just run to the toilet the next morning. The baby will be flushed out as easy as a turd. "Parang tinae mo lang," is her exact words.

Flash: six-month-old fetuses chopped up from suction.

Flash: unborn babies turned black and dried up from salt poisoning.

"We can also do it here." She pats the rickety wooden stool beside her as she fishes a checkered blanket from underneath her table.

"What, here?" I say, snapping a finger at the murderous chair.

"It'll be discreet. No one will notice, I promise," she reassures me. She unfolds the blanket and nods her head, Come.

Flash: "Pregnant? Buntis? May problema ba? May mga taong handang tumawag sa iyo. Tumawag sa," and then the number.

"But I don't like it here," I say.

"We can also do it at my place if you have enough money." She stands up from her seat, and immediately, her height registers to me as a gnome's. I also notice she's pregnant. She unfolds the blanket and tries to wrap it around my waist.

"Wait, wait, wait!" I shriek. "Not so fast. I don't have enough money with me right now."

"How much do you have?" She sits back with the blanket on her lap, and fans herself furiously with a pumpkin-colored cardboard.

"I'm not really sure if I still want to get through with this," I tell her. I forget I'm not pregnant.

Suddenly, her facial expression slackens into a scowl. She stops fanning.

"Say," she says, her eyes narrowing into suspicion, "are you here to set me up?"

"No! Of course not!"

"Raids and arrests are a common occurrence here. If you're here to trick me, my husband is right there to clobber you." She points at the burly Fuji apple vendor across the street. She fans herself again.

"Relax, relax!" I say. "I'm really interested. It's just that it's the first time I've been here and I never knew these things existed. Where do you get these things?" I pluck out a pretty brown, translucent rock from her merchandise and study it in the light with one eye. It has a tiny insect fossilized inside.

"We have a supplier." As she says this, two prostitutes, one with long hair the color of margarine, the other with coin-shaped scars all over her legs, hand her rolls of hundred peso bills. "Our supplier smuggles them from Korea. Those girls," she fingerpoints at the sluts walking away, "they're returning customers."

"I take my job seriously," she continues. She calls abortion services a job. "It's our only way to get by."

"How many kids do you have?" I eye her swollen belly.

She rests her free hand on her stomach and says, "Four."

"And that's your fifth?"

"Yes," she says, laughing. "I don't believe in abortion, you see. Whatever explanation people have, abortion is a sin." She touches the black wooden pendant of Jesus' face in between her pendulous breasts. "I'm a Catholic."

According to Pro-Life Philippines, one out of four pregnancies in the country end up in abortion. Apparently, this abortionist happens to be pro-life. I'm confused.

"I'm pro-choice," I tell her, making it sound like a conversation than an interview. "That baby inside you, I don't think it's a person just yet. I guess it's a matter of opinion."

A pending bill in Congress practically legalizes abortion. It empowers women to make choices about their body. The debate goes, abortion is illegal in the country. Thus, women resort to unsafe, clandestine methods, resulting to hospitalization, or worse, an earlier ticket to the grave.

"Don't you feel guilty doing this job?"

"Of course I do! Who wouldn't?" she says. "Every day I swallow my dignity and go here for my children." She panics a moment and says, "What's up with all these questions? Are you sure you're not here to set me up? Are you going to buy or what?" She raises one overplucked eyebrow.

"I'll think about it."

"Think about it!" She's hysterical. "You come here with all these questions and you're not going to buy anything!"

"I'll come back I promise," I say, preparing for an exit, stage left.

"When?"

"Maybe later or tomorrow," I say, itching to run away.

"All right. Just give me a second to give you my number." She reaches for a pen and paper underneath her table, scribbles something, and hands over the paper to me. "Text me when you're coming back. I'll be expecting you!"

I take the paper, study her name and number written in long, cursive loops, and walk away while saying, "I'll text you."

"Don't set me up okay!" she yells at me from my behind. I melt into the crowd.

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