Reproductive Rights and Responsibilities: The production of ethical subjects in Mexico City’s new public abortion program

• In Event: Gender and National Discourse

Abstract

This article examines how a key yet unexposed feature of Mexico City’s new public abortion program involves “responsibilization”, or the transformation of patients into ethical subjects of the modern Mexican state (Rose 2000). Invocations of individual responsibility in the program detach abortion from structural context such that it emerges as a moral problem of individuals needing ethical reconstitution. Responsibilization reflects broader transformations in “reproductive governance” unfolding throughout Latin America alongside incorporation of neoliberal economic policies and underlying logics that emphasize self-sufficiency (Morgan and Roberts 2012). Based on eighteen months of ethnographic research, including interviews with patients and staff, I argue that the moralizing context of the clinics prevents internalization of abortion rights, an element I conceptualize as central to reproductive citizenship. Building on Amuchástegui and Flores (2013), I show how the program produces sexually (ir)responsible subjects instead of the empowered citizens that feminists and policy-makers had imagined with abortion reform.

Author

• Elyse O Singer, Washington University