Abstract This ethnographic study explores the emotional labor and self‐care strategies of feminist abortion acompañantes in Northern Mexico. Operating within restrictive legal environments, acompañantes provide crucial support for self‐managed medication abortions (SMAs), engaging in significant, often invisible, emotional labor. Acompañantes need to balance activism with paid employment and family life, which creates a high risk of burnout, making self‐care an imperative. Drawing on Hochschild's work on emotional labor and Rosenbaum and Talmor's anthropology of self‐care, this article argues that acompañantes develop collective and relational self‐care practices that challenge neoliberal, individualized notions of self‐care. Through interviews, the study identifies a repertoire of strategies, including reliance on feminist networks, the crucial containment provided by intimate partners and family, the conscious organization of time as a political practice, and the use of remote accompaniment for self‐protection. The findings reveal that for acompañantes , self‐care is not a personal indulgence but a form of political resistance and collective survival, essential for sustaining both their individual well‐being and the broader feminist movement for abortion access. This research contributes to a feminist ethics of care that explicitly includes the caregiver, demonstrating that caring for oneself is an indispensable part of caring for the collective.
Alvarez et al. (Thu,) studied this question.