Lawful Sinners: Reproductive Governance and Moral Agency Around Abortion in Mexico

Abstract

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.

Interventive Care: Uncertainty, Distributed Agency, and Cesarean Section in a Zika Virus Epidemic

“…Scholarship on Latin American women's reproductive lives points to similar ambiguities. For example, Catholic women may oppose abortion in principle because they view fertility and pregnancy to be at least partially in God's hands (Roberts 2012a), even if they themselves might seek to terminate their own pregnancies based on life conditions and family needs (Singer 2018). None of my interlocutors reported having considered having an abortion, and it should be noted that both the legal status of voluntary pregnancy termination in Brazil and the late stage in pregnancy at which most women found out about their child's congenital malformations militated against abortion being a viable option, even if they had contemplated it.…”

Miss Mexico's Dress: The Struggle over Reproductive Governance in Jalisco, Mexico

“…The clergy pressured politicians to stand up for traditional gender roles, restrict access to contraception, proscribe abortion, and support fetal rights in the name of religious liberty. Meanwhile, gender justice activists championed the rights of adolescents, sexual minorities, and women of all classes and creeds (Singer ). The perspective of reproductive governance shows how Miss Mexico's dress represented disparate visions about neoliberal development as well as disputes over secular rule.…”

Maintaining the Flow: Medical Challenges to Breastfeeding and “Risky” Bodies in Mexico

“…; Carrillo and Bliss ; Castro ; Gutmann ; Murray de López , ; Santiago et al. ; Singer ; Smith‐Oka ). Here, I connect ideas about pollution and risk via Mary Douglas's notion of risk (and danger) as a forensic resource (Douglas ).…”