There are ideas that don’t need special effects to leave a mark: a simple image, a suitcase, and an uncomfortable question are enough. The video “Travel Suitcase”, shared by the Latin American Women’s Help Center, proposes an intimate exercise: “In that suitcase, you will have to put the most valuable thing in your life… but you have a problem, and it’s that the most valuable thing doesn’t fit in that suitcase.” From there, it opens a door that today they are trying to close in a hurry: life—and the love that sustains it—is not a burden or an obstacle. It is, in the deepest sense, the opportunity to exist, to be loved, and to love.
The modern promise of ‘autonomy’ and total ‘freedom’ seems attractive… until it reveals its emptiness. The video says it clearly: “We were created in the company of others”; and it poses an elemental truth that today is debated by reducing its value: human life is realized in bonds, in a sense of belonging, in family.
https://youtu.be/tLZXEogC1KQ?si=zpuT_toBeymuKW5_
The video ends with a contundent and wonderful phrase: A family doesn’t fit in a suitcase… but it does fit inside you.
That message touches a real wound on the continent. Latin America and the Caribbean are experiencing an accelerated demographic shift: the global fertility rate reached 1.8 children per woman in 2024, below the replacement level.
In Mexico, the births registered in 2023 were 1,820,888 and 5.6% corresponded to mothers aged 10 to 17, a figure that portrays a motherhood that often arrives without a safety net, without accompaniment, and with accumulated vulnerabilities.
The paradox is bitter: fewer births, and at the same time, more fragility when motherhood occurs.
Meanwhile, at the other extreme of the public debate, abortion is often presented as an “exit,” almost always with language that reduces human life to just another statistic. Official documents have estimated an annual induced abortion rate in Mexico of 33 per 1,000 women aged 15 to 44, a figure that shows it is not isolated cases but a structural phenomenon.
Here is where “Travel Suitcase” becomes more than a video: it is a mirror. The crisis is not only legal or medical; it is cultural and affective. For many women, motherhood has become synonymous with fear: of losing opportunities, of being abandoned, of carrying everything alone, of not having resources, of being judged. And when society normalizes that life “doesn’t fit”—in the budget, in the plan, in the agenda—the result is a country that impoverishes its future and hardens its heart.
In times when human life has been relativized and reduced to ‘nothing,’ “Travel Suitcase” reminds us of a permanent truth: human life is not reduced, it is embraced. And if the continent wants to emerge from its motherhood crisis, it will have to return to the essentials: protect life, dignify the mother, rebuild the family, and make accompaniment an unavoidable social commitment.
Do you know someone who needs help?
Save a Life!
Help Line: +52 55 6038 1770 (Mexico City)
Email: salvaunavid@gmail.com
Bahía de la Concepción #25, Verónica Anzures, Miguel Hidalgo.
Mexico City, Mexico, 11300.