A View from Northern Mexico: Abortions before Roe v. Wade.

Abstract

A View from Northern Mexico: Abortions before Roe v. Wade Lina-Maria Murillo (bio) On October 31, 1968, Accion: Diaro Independiente’s front page seared with the headline “Murió una Norteamericana al provocarle un aborto,” a North American woman dies after an abortion. Alongside the headline, the newspaper published a picture of the eighteen-year-old woman, Jo Anne Homann. Lying on a steel counter at the local mortuary, Homann’s long dark hair adrift on the mortician’s table, eyes closed, pale youthful face turning, her features revealed the onset of rigor mortis, her mouth slightly agape.1 Mexican newspapers in Nogales, Sonora, offered neither Homann nor her family any privacy or decorum in its reporting. Anonymity and privacy worked along a complicated continuum in Mexico. Doctors, attorneys, and abortion referral services sought to protect the identity of people providing and seeking services. Mexican news media and law enforcement demanded the opposite. Mexican authorities and politicians pushed back against racialist images of Mexico as a sanctuary for “back alley” abortionists by exposing those who sought abortions and those who provided them. No person’s identity was above publicity. The death of Jo Anne Homann, from Hemet, California, brought this issue into stark relief.2 Early reports printed the macabre picture of Homann’s corpse lying “on a cold slab” in the Nogales funeral home, as other news media printed her full name and home address.3 Meanwhile, journalists sought to present law enforcement efforts in the best light possible, stating that Mexican officials counted on the “support [End Page 30] of the brave police offers from the United States, [and] agents from the Department of Investigations, directed by Chief Rafael Torres Montaño, [who were able] to identify the deceased.”4 Highlighting the collaboration of transborder law enforcement efforts to end the scourge of illegal abortion provision in the region, Mexican newspapers made clear the local Mexican government’s position that it was neither lenient nor negligent in its stance on abortion in the borderlands. The history of abortion before Roe has been central to the history of reproduction in the twentieth-century United States. Roe v. Wade became a watershed moment in U.S.-centered reproductive rights legislation. This U.S.-centric view, however, has for too long obscured how criminalization in the United States pushed abortion across national borders before the landmark ruling.5 In other places, I have argued that U.S.-based activists and doctors deployed the back-alley butcher myth to refer to Mexican abortion providers, racializing Mexico as an inherently dangerous place and Mexican providers as innately dangerous people. This tactic hastened U.S. courts’ liberalization of abortion laws in places like California and New Mexico, setting the foundations for Roe, in the name of protecting U.S. women from potential butchery in Mexico.6 In this essay, I examine the view from Mexico of Mexican providers and of U.S. women crossing the border for abortions. While historians have studied at length the stigma women confronted in a U.S. context before Roe, there remains a dearth of information about the ways in which Mexican and other borderland periodicals described those in search of reproductive health care in Mexico.7 Given the rhetoric of danger and filth associated with medical care in Mexico, stories like the one of Jo Anne Homann reinforced narratives of Mexico as a dangerous place to seek [End Page 31] abortion care or any kind of health care. Mexicans, however, held their own strong views about the thousands of American women seeking abortions in Mexican clinics and those who provided the procedure. Assessing Mexicans’ perspective helps us view Mexico not merely as a passive extension of the U.S. reproductive landscape but as an important and active player in reproductive health care in the borderlands. In addition, the underground abortion business changed “traditional” streams of migration as mostly American women traveled south beyond U.S. borders for access to reproductive services in the 1950s and 1960s. While scholars of abortion history have foregrounded the denial of human rights of those forced to migrate for reproductive health care, the politics of specific borders should not go unrecognized in such...