On Jalan Raden Saleh, a busy street in central Jakarta, a young Indonesian woman called Sita is conducting whispered negotiations with a man in a baseball cap. He names a price - in this case, a million rupiah, or US$110 - then ushers Sita into a waiting motorised trishaw for the short trip to a nearby townhouse. There Sita is led through a grimy interior partitioned into several rooms. One is reserved for what is, in Indonesia, an illegal medical procedure that kills 7,000 women every year and maims many others: abortion.
The man in the baseball cap is one of 60 or so 'brokers' on Jalan Raden Saleh who, for a commission, introduce desperate women to backstreet abortion clinics. 'Sita' is the nickname of an Indonesian journalist who is pretending to be pregnant to infiltrate this murky world.
A woman who has an abortion can get four years in jail. The doctor who performed it can get up to 15 years. Yet 2.3 million abortions are performed in the country every year, many by unskilled practitioners with dirty equipment. Thousands more women survive, but with life-long disabilities. Deaths from unsafe abortions have helped make maternal mortality rates in Indonesia among the worst in the world.
'A woman dies every hour in Indonesia due to unsafe abortions,' says Ninuk Widyantoro, chairwoman of the Jakarta-based Women's Health Foundation and an outspoken advocate for decriminalising abortion. 'It's a very serious public health concern which we must find a way to solve.'
The economic chaos following the 1998 collapse of the Suharto regime has made the problem worse, says Ms Ninuk. In 1989, an estimated 750,000 to one million abortions were performed annually. Within a decade, that figure had doubled.
'Our maternal death rate is among the highest in the world,' says Ms Ninuk, a diminutive, immaculately dressed woman. 'Who is responsible?'