Doctors Disobeying Orders: Activist Physicians and Illegal Abortion in Argentina

• In Event: 541 - Section on Medical Sociology Paper Session. Health, Medicine and Sexualities

Abstract

In Argentina, as in the rest of Latin America, abortion is illegal in most cases. Yet in recent years activists have used the pharmaceutical misoprostol to expand women’s access to relatively safe abortion. Activists are using direct-action campaigns to make information, and sometimes the drug itself, available to women who seek abortion. This paper analyzes the role of medical professionals in the state health system who are participating in this reproductive rights movement. Doctors who are government employees are actively, and sometimes openly, promoting the use of misoprostol for safe abortion. This includes providing women with “pre and post abortion counseling,” including step-by-step instructions for inducing abortion with misoprostol. These health professionals are playing an active role in the reproductive rights movement despite their position as state employees in a state that deems abortion illegal. By increasing access to safe abortion at the point of contact of poor women with the state, these professionals and their activist allies are reframing abortion as an issue of public health and social inequality, asserting reproductive rights on behalf of their patients in the absence of state action, and ultimately increasing pressure on lawmakers to legalize abortion. In this paper I analyze both the social and institutional changes that have allowed doctors to take on this activist role, and the broader political implications of their actions for the reproductive rights movement.

Author

• Julia A McReynolds-Pérez, University of Wisconsin-La Crosse