Women's interpretations of the right to legal abortion in Mexico City: citizenship, experience and clientelism

Abstract

In April 2007, after a period of intense social debate, the Mexico City Legal Assembly legalized abortion during the first 12 weeks of pregnancy, which was an unprecedented development in women's rights in Mexico. Within the context of a proliferation of public discourses about women's citizenship rights changes in women's social status in Mexico, this article explores the extent to which the newly legalized character of abortion is interpreted by women as a right. Drawing on 24 interviews with women who had a legal termination of pregnancy between 2008 and 2009, this research shows that legalization opens up new and complex relationships between women as subjects of rights and the state. Such relationships are expressed as three discursive figures: legal abortion (1) as a concession from the government, (2) as ‘excessive’ tolerance by the state, and (3) as a right to be protected and guaranteed. The analysis shows that women's interpretations of the right to legal abortion are mediated by profound transformations, which Mexican society is currently undergoing. These include changes related to a shift from a clientist political culture to one more framed in terms of citizenship, the subjective effects of family planning policies, and their ambivalent relationships with Catholic notions of women and motherhood, and the effects of feminist discourses of women's citizenship, abortion, and reproductive rights.

Keywords::

• legal abortion
• citizenship
• women's rights
• Mexico

Notes

^1. The reform to the Mexico City Penal Code establishes that abortion is ‘the termination of pregnancy after 12 weeks of gestation’ and pregnancy as ‘the part of the process of human reproduction that starts with the implantation of the embryo in the endometrium’ (Article 144, Mexico City's Penal Code, our emphasis).

^2. Since 2002, the Alianza Nacional por el Derecho a Decidir (andar) (Alliance for the Right to Decide) formed by the most prominent professional feminist organizations (Católicas por el Derecho a Decidir, GIRE, Population Council, Equidad de Género and IPAS-México) led political activism and lobbying for legal abortion.

^3. Such a progressive reform was approved while the conservative Partido Acción Nacional (PAN) was in presidential office, and the left-wing Partido de la Revolución Democrática (PRD) ruled the capital city. This political opposition set the context for a strong political dispute between both levels of government, in which abortion debates became a key issue.

^4. Before the approval of the first population law in 1974, use and distribution of contraception was illegal in the country. With this legal reform, the state took on the responsibility of health services organized around the notion of ‘family planning’, http://www.juridicas.unam.mx/publica/librev/rev/derhum/cont/38/pr/pr31.pdf [Accessed 4 Jun 2012].

^5. In 1856, President Juarez's liberal party declared the separation between church and state, expropriated and denied the church property ownership, but it was only in 2012 that the Republic of Mexico has been declared secular in the Federal Constitution.

^6. For further reference of the states' reforms, see ‘Reformas aprobadas a las constituciones estatales que protegen la vida desde la concepción/fecundación 2008–2011’, http://www.gire.org.mx/publica2/ReformasAbortoConstitucion_Marzo14_2011.pdf [Accessed 4 Jun 2012].

^7. For instance, by 2009 about 30 women suspected of having abortions had received sentences for up to 35 years of prison after being prosecuted for ‘kinship murder’ in the PAN-ruled state of Guanajuato (La Jornada 2010).

^8. ‘Each person has the right to decide in a free, responsible and informed manner about the number and spacing of his/her children’.

^9. We understand ‘performative’ as those actions that carry meaning and that ‘produce the reality they describe’ (Austin 1999). In this sense, the state provision of LTP produces the reality of abortion as a legal practice.

^10. Social security in Mexico, although protected in the Constitution since 1917, only became available in 1943. Currently, it covers about 45% of the population formally employed, whether in the private or the public sector.

^11. Since the foundation of the Partido Revolucionario Institucional (PRI) in 1929, workers, peasants, and popular sectors were organized as clienteles within the party's corporative system. Clientelist practices associated with such organization have been acutely deepened since the 1990s by the increasing dismantling of the (imperfect) Mexican welfare state and the imposition of focalized social policies against poverty (León Corona 2011).

^12. The law states that LTP is a service available in Mexico City to all women. There are no requirements except official ID and, in case of being a minor, to be accompanied by an adult. For those who have social security or who come from a different state or country, there is a small fee.

^13. Such appreciations contrast radically with official data that show that by January 2013, the rate of repeated LTPs was 2.09%, https://www.gire.org.mx/index.php?option = com_content&view = article&id = 504&Itemid = 1397&lang = es.

^14. Men's resistance to condoms has been widely documented by social research. Such resistance is anchored in dominant gender relations, as documented by several analyses of sociodemographic surveys (Szasz et al.2008).

^15. During the 1970s and 1980s, population campaigns used slogans like ‘A small family for a better life’ or ‘Less children to give them more’. This means that contraception was – and still is – framed almost exclusively within the context of the marriage and the family, and not so much as part of women's individual rights to decide over reproduction.

^16. For Foucault (1981), biopower consisted of a whole set of new techniques of power developed in Europe during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, associated with the rise of the notion of ‘population’ in modern states. Sexuality served as the intersection between individual subjects and the population, through discipline techniques in which individuals were incited to exert control over themselves.

^17. For instance, one bishop argued that, although it was true that the new law did not ‘send people to have an abortion, it opens a wide door for permissiveness that will foster more sexual activity in the minds of many young men and women, looking only for pleasure and avoiding the responsibility of procreation’ (La Jornada 2007).

^18. This happened in early 2008 because of medical negligence: the physician in charge did not confirm the time of gestation and the procedure got complicated. He was investigated and tried (El Universal 2009).

^19. According to the National Abortion Federation, a small percentage of women (0.5–2%) may need a subsequent suction procedure due to heavy or prolonged bleeding, http://www.prochoice.org/about_abortion/facts/medical_abortion.html [Accessed 4 Mar 2013]. Raffaela Schiavon, director of IPAS Mexico, has stated that ‘when medical abortion is carried out in safe conditions, as it has been with first trimester procedures in Mexico City since 2007, the risk is zero in 93 thousand LTP, while the rate of deaths during delivery is ten times higher. Legal abortion is very safe, safer than delivery’, http://www.ciudadaniasx.org/?20-mexico-expertos-desmienten [Accessed 4 Mar 2013].

^20. During the debates, one of the bishops asked the mothers of ‘pro-abortion legislators to ask their children to reject the legal reform because, if they pass it, they will be responsible for many lives that will be destroyed within the mothers’ womb'. http://www.jornada.unam.mx/2007/04/13/index.php?section = sociedad&article = 041n2soc [Accessed 4 Jun 2012].

^21. Undoubtedly, in this symbolic construction, the widespread use of ecography plays an important role (Franklin 1991).

^22. Some participants reported having pain, vomit, and fever. Other reasons for this ‘unpleasantness’ were the fact that LTP is only provided in Mexico City and, despite considering the service to be of good quality, that they had to spend some time doing paperwork.

^23. Although fertility regulation has often helped to realize Mexican women's aspirations to decide on the number and spacing of their pregnancies, the ways such policies have been implemented have focused more on reducing population growth than on offering the conditions necessary to exercise reproductive choice. This is evidenced by the disproportionately higher percentage of bilateral tubal ligation procedures (45%), compared to other non-permanent fertility control methods (Palma and Palma 2003).

^24. Several authors (Lau 2006, Espinosa 2009) consider that the notion of a ‘feminist movement’ in Mexico is incapable of describing the different types of women's activism, demands, and perspectives of political action. In particular, Tuñón identifies three differentiated groups in what she calls the ‘broader women's movement’ (BWM): the feminists (members of the increasingly professionalized NGO sector), women from popular sectors, and members of political parties (1997, p. 61). For Espinosa, the BWM has four currents that converge and diverge at different moments: the historical, the popular, the civic, and the indigenous (2009, p. 24).

^25. ‘Second wave Mexican feminism, as is the case of its counterparts in the United States and Europe, differs from the feminism led by the suffragettes, who fought for women's right to vote in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. This new feminism seeks to eliminate women's inequality and pursues gender equality, while placing the female body and its manifestations at the core of their claims' (Lau 2006, p. 181).

^26. For feminists, voluntary motherhood implied ‘four aspects that the state had to promote and ensure: sex education, access to contraceptive methods, abortion, and rejection of forced sterilization’ (Lamas 2001).

^27. During her speech before the Supreme Court, Marta Lamas used this same argument for legalization: voluntary motherhood is an ethical decision taken by a self-responsible subject. In order to defend women's autonomy, it is essential to stop considering motherhood as a destiny and to start seeing it as a work of love that, in order to be fully accomplished, entails a previous condition: desire. Available in video: http://www.clacaidigital.info:8080/xmlui/handle/123456789/216 [Accessed 3 Jun 2012].

^28. Propelled by the international UN Conferences of Cairo and Beijing and by the consequent institutionalization of reproductive rights, civic feminism gained strength in the political scene of the 1990s. The growth of NGO's and the professionalization of feminist activists deepened the relevance of the language of citizenship and rights in relation to reproduction.

^29. Interestingly, this is exactly the same argument, though spoken in legal terms, that Supreme Court Minister Olga Sánchez Cordero used during the debates about decriminalization, which is the need to weigh up between two opposing rights: those of women and those of the nasciturus (the unborn), http://www.animalpolitico.com/blogueros-treinta-y-siete-grados/2011/10/03/las-razones-de-las-ministras-olga-sanchez-cordero-y-margarita-luna/.

^30. Like the slow but steady delay in first marriage and its increased dissolution – and thus the separation of sexual, conjugal, and reproductive life – as well as women's growing presence in the labor market and higher education (INEGI 2009).

^31. Discourses of citizenship have only been prominent in Mexico for the last three decades, because it increasingly came to mean – as in many countries in Latin America after the authoritarian regimes of the 1970s – not merely a legal status, but also a political strategy that social movements ‘discovered’ from the ‘lived experience’ of those suffering the aftermath of such regimes: ‘a new political grammar revolving around notions of democracy, civil society, citizenship and rights [was constructed]. Instead of the ruling class strategy begin imposed from above, what was articulated was a citizenship strategy “from below”’ (Assies et al., 2005, p. 103).

^32. The strong social movement for political rights that arose from the electoral fraud committed by the PRI during the presidential elections of 1988 marked a turning point for Mexican feminism, since citizenship became, along with democracy, the main political banners for progressive sectors in the country. As Espinosa (2009, p. 214) puts it, ‘the construction of a “citizen identity” asked for the simultaneous deconstruction of old political identities’. New alliances between feminism and other progressive sectors were possible in this context.

^33. For instance, the less they desired to have a child – apart from the difficult personal and economic situations – the more relief they felt and the more LTP was felt as a practice of autonomy. On the contrary, the more they wanted the child, but had no social and personal favorable conditions to care for it, the more emotionally painful the abortion was, and the more it was felt as forced by external circumstances.

This paper is part of the research project ‘Body, Subjectivity, and Citizenship: Methodologies for the Promotion of Subjects of Rights in the Field of Sexuality’, coordinated by Ana Amuchástegui and Rodrigo Parrini, Universidad Autónoma Metropolitana-Xochimilco, (UAM-X) Mexico, and the Grupo de Información en Reproducción Elegida/GIRE (Group of Information on Reproductive Choice), supported by the Ford Foundation.