This situation dragged on for some three years until a new government was formed in January 2020. Since March 2020 abortion is now officially legal in the North, although a woman went on trial as recently as July 2019 for buying pills online for her fifteen-year-old daughter. This is the context in which these disappearances and murders took place – a country where shame lingers even more than twenty years later, where women still do not have equal rights, where homophobia and intolerance remain rife.
