The economic and political crisis in Venezuela is pushing women to make frightening and dangerous decisions about their bodies — including having illegal abortions at home, and often doing them on their own, BuzzFeed News reported. 

According to the news outlet, the number of abortions in Venezuela has grown in recent months despite a legal ban.

"Women can no longer control their reproduction," Magdymar León, head of the nonprofit Venezuelan Association for Alternative Sexual Education, known as Avesa, told BuzzFeed News. "It's a critical situation."

BuzzFeed News recounted the hair-raising story of a woman named Beatriz, 27, who has two daughters and has been on birth control for years — but who performed her own abortion twice in a six-year period.

She did so each time with pills containing misoprostol that she inserted into her vagina, BuzzFeed reported. Though approved by the FDA to treat gastric ulcers, many women use misoprostol to carry out abortions when they do not have any other choice, BuzzFeed News reported.

The FDA warns abortions done with the medication "may be incomplete," the news outlet reported. And in her second abortion, Beatriz wound up in an economically strained hospital for just that reason.

The ordeal the second time was also more expensive. One misoprostol pill now costs the equivalent of a monthly minimum wage. To end a four-week-long pregnancy, women need around five pills, the news outlet reported. And Beatriz had to buy everything the hospital would need to ultimately treat her, including gauze and gloves for the doctors, from the black market, BuzzFeed News reported.

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