Sometimes when the pain hits, Agnes* has to pause for several seconds to ride out the excruciating wave. It feels like someone has tied a rope to her insides and is pulling and twisting it, the 27-year-old Nigerian domestic worker says, making it hard to bend or stand up straight.
Agnes’s ordeal started in March in the Iraqi city of Basra when her boss raped her at gunpoint. She fell pregnant, and the man then forced her to undergo a painful abortion. It was so difficult, Agnes said, that she could not sit for three days. Since then, the severe abdominal pains won’t go away, and there’s no one to take her to a hospital.
