This paper is based on qualitative in-depth interviews conducted from 2008 to 2009 with 118 ethnically diverse Ecstasy users from the greater Hartford area, CT, USA. Participants were urban, primarily Black and Hispanic, aged 18 to 36, and had limited higher education compared with samples in previous Ecstasy research. Interviews focused on personal background, history of Ecstasy and other drug use, and recent sexual events. In this paper, we examine: participants' negotiation of perceived risks and benefits of Ecstasy use, behavioral strategies employed to minimize risks, and the relationship of risk-benefit analysis, motivation for use, frequency of use, and polydrug use to participants' sense of control over their Ecstasy use. We conclude with recommendations for intervention approaches and suggestions for future research.
I analyze the alternative tactics and logics of Las Fuertes, a feminist organization that has taken an "alegal" approach to realizing the human right to abortion in the conservative Mexican state of Guanajuato. Since a series of United Nations agreements throughout the 1990s enshrined reproductive rights as universal human rights, Mexican feminists have adopted the human rights platform as a lobbying tool to pressure the government to reform restrictive abortion laws. This strategy bore fruit in Mexico City, with passage of the historic 2007 abortion legalization. Las Fuertes has leveraged the human rights strategy differently - to justify the direct provision of local abortion accompaniment in a context of near-total abortion criminalization. By directly seizing abortion rights, rather than seeking to implement them through legalistic channels, Las Fuertes has effectively challenged Mexican reproductive governance in an adversarial political environment.
The Catholic Hierarchy unequivocally bans abortion, defining it as a mortal sin. In Mexico City, where the Catholic Church wields considerable political and popular power, abortion was recently decriminalized in a historic vote. Of the roughly 170,000 abortions that have been carried out in Mexico City's new public sector abortion program to date, more than 60% were among self-reported Catholic women. Drawing on eighteen months of fieldwork, including interviews with 34 Catholic patients, this article examines how Catholic women in Mexico City grapple with abortion decisions that contravene Church teachings in the context of recent abortion reform. Catholic women consistently leveraged the local cultural, economic, and legal context to morally justify their abortion decisions against church condemnation. I argue that Catholic women seeking abortion resist religious injunctions on their reproductive behavior by articulating and asserting their own moral agency grounded in the contextual dimensions of their lives. My analysis informs conversations in medical anthropology on moral decision-making around reproduction and on local dynamics of resistance to reproductive governance. Moreover, my findings speak to the deficiencies of a feminist vision focused narrowly on fertility limitation, versus an expanded framework of reproductive justice that considers as well the need for conditions of income equality and structural supports to facilitate reproduction and parenting among women who desire to keep their pregnancies.
Building on medical anthropology literature that analyzes doctor-patient interactions as a charged site for the production of political subjectivities, I demonstrate how a central feature of Mexico City's new public sector abortion program involves "responsibilization." In accordance with entrenched Ministry of Health objectives, providers transmit a suite of values about personal responsibility and self-regulation through the use of birth control, hinging abortion rights to responsible reproductive subjectivity. Based on 18 months of ethnographic research across program clinics, including 75 interviews with patients and providers, I show how interrupción legal del embarazo protocols fashion "responsibilized" liberal subjects. I argue that the recent granting of abortion rights in Mexico City-ostensibly a new moment for the construction of women's citizenship-instead reflects and extends long-standing state agendas of "reproductive governance." My analysis of reproductive rights as the newest framing of ongoing population policies in Mexico adds to a critical anthropology of human rights and of liberal projects of governance.
This statement summarizes key findings from anthropological and related scholarship on the harmful consequences of inadequate abortion access, leading the Society for Medical Anthropology to register profound concern about the recent Supreme Court decision in Dobbs v. Jackson. After circulation to SMA members for input, a finalized version passed a membership vote by an overwhelming margin. This statement complements one produced by the Council for Anthropology and Reproduction, available here.
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