Abortion in Mexico: A History

Abortion in Mexico: A History concisely examines the long history of abortion from the early post-contact period through the present day in Mexico by studying the law, criminal and ecclesiastical trials, medical texts, newspapers, and other popular publications.

Nora E. Jaffary draws on courts’ and medical practitioners’ handling of birth termination to advance two central arguments. First, Jaffary contends, the social, legal, and judicial condemnation of abortion should be understood more as an aberration than the norm in Mexico, as legal conditions and long periods of Mexican history indicate that the law, courts, the medical profession, and everyday Mexicans tolerated the practice. Second, the historical framework of abortion differed greatly from its present representation. The language of fetal personhood and the notion of the inherent value of human life were not central elements of the conceptualization of abortion until the late twentieth century. Until then, the regulation of abortion derived exclusively out of concerns for pregnant people themselves, and specifically about their embodiment of sexual honor.

In Abortion in Mexico Jaffary presents the first longue durée examination of this history from a variety of locations in Mexico, providing a concise yet comprehensive overview of the practice of abortion and informing readers of just how much the debate has evolved.

Nora E. Jaffary is a professor of history at Concordia University. She is the author of Reproduction and Its Discontents in Mexico: Childbirth and Contraception in Mexico, 1750-1905 and False Mystics: Deviant Orthodoxy in Colonial Mexico (Nebraska, 2008).