Luisa’s Ghosts: Haunted Legality and Collective Expressions of Pain

ABSTRACT

Feminist health care providers have debated the efficacy of the decriminalization of abortion in Mexico City. Luisa, a counselor in a private clinic, suggested that while the law has expanded the visibility of, and access to safe abortion, it has also called forth “other ghosts.” In this article, I take Luisa’s critical perspective as a starting point for examining ongoing criminalization and moral stigma as forms of haunting that arise in the wake of the Mexico City abortion policy. Drawing on ethnographic research, I explore how Luisa’s ghosts materialize in the embodied- affective relations between patients in new legal clinics. Women who attend public clinics negotiate moral stigma along with religious and familial pressures in the ways they suffer, as well as normalize abortion as a painful experience. Rather than approach pain as purely a sign of victimization, I suggest that its expression constitutes an effervescent collectivity between women in the clinic, making explicit, while at the same time dissipating, an intractable moral-affective knot that might otherwise be ignored.

SPANISH ABSTRACT

Profesionales de la salud sexual y reproductiva han debatido la efectividad de la despenalización del aborto en la Ciudad de México. Luisa, una orientadora feminista en una clínica privada de la ciudad, sugirió que si bien la ley ha ampliado la visibilidad y el acceso al aborto seguro, también ha generado “otros fantasmas.” En este artículo, considero como punto de partida la perspectiva crítica de Luisa para analizar cómo el estigma moral y la criminalización del aborto siguen presentes en la nueva política de “Interrupción Legal del Embarazo (ILE)” en la Ciudad de México. Basándome en investigación etnográfica, exploro cómo los fantasmas que Luisa menciona se materializan en las relaciones afectivo-corporales entre las pacientes dentro de la clínica. Las mujeres que acuden a las clínicas públicas tienen que negociar la manera en la que sufren y normalizan la experiencia del aborto como algo doloroso tanto con el estigma moral como con las normas religiosas y familiares. Así, en este trabajo, en lugar de entender el dolor como signo de la victimización de dichas mujeres, desarrollo cómo las expresiones de dolor generan una colectividad efervescente dentro de la clínica, volviendo explícitos, y de ese modo disipando, los fantasmas que de otra forma podrían ser renegados.

KEYWORDS:

• Mexico City
• abortion
• affect
• legality
• moral stigma
• reproductive governance

PALABRAS CLAVE:

• Ciudad de México
• aborto
• corporealidad afectiva
• legalidad
• estigma moral
• gobernanza reproductiva

Acknowledgments

I owe so much to the activists at Fondo MARIA, whose ongoing work gives political importance to this research. Thank you Rocía for your radical feminist perspective. I am grateful to Saiba Varma and Emma Varley for their engagement with so many iterations of these ideas, and to Deborah Poole, Veena Das, and Clara Han who provided years of guidance for the ethnographic project. Thanks to Nandi Theunissen, João Biehl, Oriana López Uribe, Didier Fassin, and the anonymous reviewers at Medical Anthropology for their lucid insights on the final versions of the article.

Notes

1. The Calderón government also sought to break alliances with drug trafficking organizations, which incited a surge of narco-related violence across Mexico (Sierra, Hernández Castillo, and Sieder 2013).

2. All names have been changed to protect confidentiality. Fondo MARIA wanted the name of the organization in print. http://fondomaria.org/paginas/que-es-fondo-maria.

3. “Nonconsensual artificial insemination” was one of the “exceptional causes for impunity” added to the Mexico City penal code in the passage of Ley Robles in 2000, often cited as the necessary precursor to the 2007 legislation. Due to the way exception works as an opening in Mexican abortion law, the actual cases that would pertain to “nonconsensual artificial insemination” are not that important, but rather the textual insertion of a legal concept of consent.

4. TRAP laws (Targeted Restrictions on Abortion Providers), “pro-life” activists mobilize technicalities of legality. https://www.plannedparenthoodaction.org/issues/abortion/trap-laws.

5. Luisa spoke to the undecidability and binding nature of the gift. In the words of Marcel Mauss: “The drink-present can be a poison; with the exception of a dark drama, it isn’t; but it can always become one… [it] permanently links those who partake and is always liable to turn against one of them if he would fail to honor the law” (Mauss 1997).

6. The two other ILE clinics that operate with an NGO model are Marie Stopes and Mexfam.

7. See http://www.salud.df.gob.mx/portal/index.php/programas-y-accionesc/gratuidad.

8. Numerous criminal cases against women, for procuring an abortion, have been initiated by nurses and physicians. It has not been documented whether hospital reporting has increased following the 2007 Mexico City law.

9. The World Health Organization (2012), to the contrary, recommends the non-clinical use of misoprostol for safe abortion in resource poor settings.

10. See Poole and Das (2004) on zones of ambiguity between legality and illegality.

11. The word pena, often used by women to describe their experience of abortion, implies suffering, punishment and shame, and in some Latin American contexts, even ghost. For more on the relation between sin and suffering, see Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz, Poem 57 from the Romances (1997).

12. The fear of death from abortion, like childbirth, is another ghost that haunts clinical care. This fear is based on high maternal mortality rates, but it also mixes ambiguously with the fear of pain as punishment for moral transgression.

13. Lydia Zacher Dixon (2015) complicates this discussion by locating midwives’ claims to victimization within a struggle to define what constitutes “obstetric violence” when extraordinary (narco-related) violence has become part of everyday life.

14. Aidan Seale-Feldman presented a paper titled “Fragments of a Transient Affliction” at the 2017 AES meeting that spoke to this idea. She tracked expressions of hysteria as “a heightened of state of relationality.”

15. Sarah Pinto’s (2016) discussion of “the clinical theater for hysteria” under the male gaze suggests that the performance of female disorder establishes a relation between doctor and patient. Here the theater of pain establishes a relationship between patients.

Additional information

Funding

This research was funded by the Wenner-Gren Foundation for Anthropological Research. 

Notes on contributors

Amy Krauss

Amy Krauss is a postdoctoral research fellow in the Global Health Program at Princeton University, USA. She is the author of the article “The Ephemeral Politics of Feminist Accompaniment Networks in Mexico City,” published by Feminist Theory.