ESHS/HSS Annual Meeting

Between punitive measures and medicalisation: representations of self-managed abortion in contemporary Spain (1985–2022)

• In Event: Representing Pregnancy: Science and Culture in the 20th Century 3

English Abstract

This paper presents a socio-historical analysis of how the emergence of self-managed medication abortion outside medical institutions has been represented in the medical, legal, and political discourses in Spain after partial decriminalization of abortion in 1985. Through archival materials, press articles, legal rulings, and oral testimonies, this paper examines how the medical-legal paradigm defined safe abortion as a medical act performed exclusively by physicians in accredited clinics in a legal frame. I concentrate on the social and scientific representations of the pharmacological technique used in self-managed abortion—specifically misoprostol and mifepristone—as simultaneously medical and moral objects.
I analyze two case studies of self-managed abortion in Spain: media coverage and legal persecution in the early 2000s of Latin American migrant women who performed self-managed abortions using misoprostol, and the case of the Ministry of Health's blocking of the Women on Web organization's website in 2020 without a court order. These two cases exemplify how, although since 2022 the World Health Organization recognizes medication abortion as a safe and effective practice when adequate information and resources are available, institutional and media narratives in Spain have often framed these drugs as inherently dangerous when consumed outside medical supervision. I conclude that the historical construction of the system of access to abortion through the medical-legal paradigm had effects on reproductive control resulting in the revictimization and criminal punishment of women who self-manage abortions, often represented in Spanish public opinion through the image of the “irresponsible” migrant woman.

Author

• María Mundi-López, University of Granada/EHESS