Beyond 12 weeks: How Abortion Activists in Mexico Produce Subversive Later Abortion Expertise

• In Event: Reproductive Subversion Reconsidered: Contemporary Politics of Reproductive Knowledge

Abstract

Abortion in Mexico is undergoing a profound transformation. While the procedure was decriminalized nationwide in 2023 and is supposedly available for free in state-sponsored healthcare, access remains precarious and shaped by class, race, and gendered inequalities. I argue that legal gestational limits do more than regulate abortion access, they limit what can be known about abortion care. This paper draws on ethnographic research with abortion acompañantes (accompaniers) and feminist abortion collectives across Mexico, including 25 in-depth interviews, accompaniment trainings and co-accompaniments. I find that institutional withdrawal beyond the 12-week mark creates the conditions for activists to build later abortion expertise as clandestine and subversive, encompassing much more than medical knowledge. This expertise is political, emotional, and sociological. Activists learn to navigate and circumvent healthcare barriers, mobilize legal exceptions, coach abortion seekers through clinical encounters, manage the emotional and moral dimensions of later abortions, and develop disposal protocols that vary by gestation. Later abortion expertise is subversive insofar it circulates outside institutions, challenges the monopoly of medical and legal systems on abortion knowledge and its limits, and confronts structural inequalities by building an alternative infrastructure of reproductive knowledge.

Author

• Daniela Sanchez Lopez, University of Texas-Austin