A migrant farm worker from Mexico, Gabriela Flores has struggled to support her three young children.

So when the 22-year-old became pregnant again last year, she didn’t know what to do — especially when the father refused to help, she told Lexington County sheriff’s deputies.

Flores resorted to an abortion using illegal drugs sent to her from Mexico and wound up in jail for four months under a rarely used state law that makes it a crime for a woman to perform an abortion on herself.

“I knew that I was not going to be able to support four kids — two here and two in Mexico,” she said in a handwritten police statement in Spanish. “Please understand me. They need me a lot. They are little. Please forgive me.”

Flores had an abortion last October, police records show. She told deputies she was four months pregnant at the time.

Abortion is legal in South Carolina and nationwide when performed by a licensed doctor.

Deputies said Flores performed the abortion in her Pelion home by taking pills she obtained from her sister in Mexico.

Her case is the only such pending case in South Carolina, according to records at the S.C. Office of Court Administration.

Flores spent nearly four months in the Lexington County jail before she was released on her own recognizance.

She is awaiting trial on the unlawful abortion charge. She also is charged with failure to report the abortion to the county coroner.

If convicted, Flores could face up to two years in state prison and a $1,000 fine.

Prosecutors had considered charging her with murder, sheriff’s reports said.

Critics say Flores’ case raises questions about how poor Hispanics are treated by the state’s justice system and about their access to medical services.

“She probably should have, instead of being arrested, been sent to a hospital,” said Silvia Henriquez, executive director of the National Latina Institute for Reproductive Health in New York.

Flores has a fifth-grade education and speaks no English, according to police reports. That made her an easy target for authorities, said Wyndi Anderson of the New York-based National Advocates for Pregnant Women.

“This is clearly another case of an opportunity for somebody to use it as a springboard for their political career, and it’s disgusting,” she said.

Lexington County sheriff’s spokesman John Allard said his department, headed by Sheriff James Metts, was doing its job.

“Our agency has no position on abortion,” Allard said. “It’s not our job to critique the law. It’s our job to enforce the law.”

Allard said he couldn’t recall another similar case handled by his department in the past five years.

Contacted last week, Lexington County solicitor Donnie Myers said he was unaware of the case and referred questions to deputy solicitor Rick Hubbard. Efforts to reach Hubbard last week were unsuccessful.

Flores’ lawyer, Jack Duncan of the Lexington County public defender’s office, declined comment, saying he didn’t want to jeopardize Flores’ case.

Efforts to reach Flores were unsuccessful.

From 2000 through 2004 in South Carolina, there were five other cases involving charges of performing an unlawful abortion, state court records show.

Three of the cases were in Orangeburg County; the other two in Lee and Marion counties. Four of the five cases were dropped by either prosecutors or judges.

The fifth defendant pleaded guilty in Marion County in 2001. It was not immediately clear Friday what the sentence was.

A LONG NIGHT

Flores told authorities she took five Cytotec pills at about 9 p.m. Oct. 1, 2004, police records show. By about 3 a.m. Oct. 2, she had aborted the fetus on her bed in her Harvey Berry Road home, reports said.

Cytotec is used to prevent ulcers in people who take certain arthritis or pain medicines, according to the National Institutes of Health. The drug, however, can cause abortions.

In her police statement, Flores said the fetus was dead when it was born and that she wrapped it in bedsheets and put it in a bag.

Deputies said Flores later that morning buried the fetus in a 3-foot-deep grave behind her home with the help of Zenida Gonzalez-Gomez, 37, of the same address.

Efforts were unsuccessful to reach Gonzalez-Gomez, who is charged with obstruction of justice and, like Flores, failure to notify the coroner.

Gonzalez-Gomez told deputies she was called to Flores’ bedroom a short time after the abortion but said she didn’t see or hear the fetus.

She said when Flores asked her to help bury the fetus, she initially refused but changed her mind after Flores said she would “put it in the trash,” according to Gonzalez-Gomez’s police statement.

Gonzales-Gomez told deputies she didn’t immediately report the death because she didn’t know how to call an ambulance. But she said she told a neighbor, according to a police report.

Flores in her statement said another woman later told her that, if she had gone to the hospital, she would “end up in jail.”

“I was very afraid for my kids because they were going to be left alone,” Flores told deputies.

ABORTION OR MURDER CHARGE?

Deputies became involved five days later, after a woman who knows Flores informed staff at a Batesburg-Leesville pediatric clinic that she was told the fetus was born alive, police reports said.

When questioned by a Spanish-speaking deputy, Flores gave a false name, according to reports. She later said she did so because she was told by a friend that she “could get in trouble” and that she was “afraid she would be taken away from her three other children,” a Sheriff’s Department report said.

Flores was taken to the hospital for an examination before she was booked at the Lexington County jail, records show.

Deputies obtained a search warrant and dug up the fetus.

The coroner’s office couldn’t determine the cause of death; the weight was listed at about a half-pound. A sheriff’s report said a witness was told the fetus was a girl. The coroner’s report did not list a gender or an age.

Arrest warrants said the fetus was 5 or 6 months old, though Flores told deputies she was four months pregnant.

Doctors informed Flores she was pregnant in August 2004, a witness told deputies.

Sheriff’s reports indicate prosecutors decided not to charge Flores with murder because they couldn’t prove the fetus might have survived on its own.

LACK OF ACCESS

Nationally, Hispanic and black women have higher abortion rates than non-Hispanic white women, according to the National Latina Institute for Reproductive Health.

The rates are 49 abortions per 1,000 women and 33 per 1,000 for black and Hispanic women, respectively, compared with 13 per 1,000 for non-Hispanic white women. Black and Hispanic women have higher rates mainly because they have higher rates of unintended pregnancies, according to the institute.

Language barriers and poverty make it difficult for many Hispanic women to obtain legal abortions, institute director Henriquez said. Abortion has been legal nationally since a 1973 U.S. Supreme Court ruling.

In South Carolina, in the third trimester of a pregnancy, the life or health of the mother must be at risk for the abortion to be legal.

Reach Brundrett at (803) 771-8484 or rbrundrett@thestate.com.