Lawful Sins: Abortion Rights and Reproductive Governance in Mexico

Abstract

Lawful Sins examines the provisioning of and social attitudes toward legal abortion (interrupción legal del embarazo in Spanish, or ILE) in Mexico City after a 2007 reform decriminalized the procedure in the capital up to 12 weeks in pregnancy. Through ethnographic interviews and informal conversations at two ILE clinics carried out approximately seven years after the reform's passage, Singer explores patients' and clinicians' perspectives toward abortion and other reproductive phenomena, as well as the “dynamics of care” in the clinics, which the author argues “were central to the instantiation of abortion rights there” (p. 27). Singer also examines a few organizations providing abortion care to women in other regions of Mexico, either by facilitating women's travel to the capital or by assisting them in managing medical abortions at home.Lawful Sins forms part of a growing body of literature that highlights the failure of rights-based frameworks to resolve several key ambiguities surrounding abortion, including women's and clinicians' conceptualizations of the procedure, the chasm between publicly stated attitudes on and private experiences with abortion, and the processes through which women make decisions about their pregnancies. As in Bolivia (and elsewhere in Latin America), few individuals with whom Singer spoke unequivocally supported women's right to abortion under all circumstances. Most instead emphasized that some women (i.e., survivors of rape) “deserved” access to abortion more than others (i.e., women who had terminated more than one pregnancy). Clinicians with whom Singer spoke also emphasized the medical, psychic, and social “risks” of abortion and conceptualized their own role as “protect[ing] the Mexican family” by preventing repeat abortions, encouraging women to use contraception, and impressing on them their “responsibilities” as women and mothers (pp. 141, 148). As in other Latin American contexts, Singer also finds that neither legal reform nor rights-based advocacy has resolved the unequal nature of abortion care in Mexico. The mostly poor women living in the capital able to access the ILE system find the experience emotionally and logistically taxing, while wealthier women may opt out of the process altogether by visiting private clinics to secure abortions. Meanwhile, women living outside the capital or unable to navigate the hurdles of the ILE system manage their own abortions, either by purchasing medications over the counter or by employing some other strategy.As Singer notes, Lawful Sins emerges at an opportune—and in some contexts, distressing—time in the landscape of global abortion laws and realities. Published shortly before the reversal of Roe v. Wade, Singer references the “circular patterns of abortion travel” made by women on both sides of the United States–Mexico border over the last several decades—patterns again on the rise in the wake of the US Supreme Court decision (p. 7). Following Mexico City's 2007 reform, other Mexican states initially tightened abortion restrictions before several moved to liberalize access to the procedure in the last few years. Concurrently, as Singer shows, activists have stepped in to fill gaps in care left by a shifting legal landscape, employing both legal and extralegal means—a pattern also evident elsewhere in the region.A central contribution of Singer's book is the clear window it provides into the everyday goings-on inside Mexico City's ILE clinics. The reader gets a vivid sense of clinicians' and patients' experiences at clinics, as well as the infrastructural problems that make abortion difficult to provide and to access, including resource shortages, long wait times, limited appointments, and challenging commutes. Singer's investigation into the meanings of Catholicism to the individuals with whom she speaks is also enlightening. While secular readers may be tempted to chalk up some Catholics' willingness to procure abortion to hypocrisy, Singer thoughtfully unpacks patients' and clinicians' nuanced views on questions of faith, which include critiques of the church as an institution and beliefs about the importance of an individual relationship with God.On the other hand, Singer poses, I would argue, a somewhat false dichotomy with respect to the way that abortion is viewed in Mexico versus the United States, presenting the abortion debate in the latter as “focused overwhelmingly on the ontological status of the fetus” rather than reflecting broader efforts to control women in the face of threats posed by political and social change (p. 36). The ambiguity that Singer identifies in patients' and doctors' attitudes toward women who seek abortion in Mexico City, for instance, is also present in clinics to the north (if not necessarily in the one Midwest facility where the author worked). Finally, while Lawful Sins presents a view of abortion that is firmly grounded in Mexico's history and culture, the book provides less insight into how Mexico's reproductive history compares with those of other countries in the region, which were similarly marked by patterns of religious contradiction and moral ambiguity, as well as shifting concerns about eugenics and overpopulation.