Reclaiming Autonomy: The Changing Landscape of Mexican Abortion Activism

This article critically explores understandings of autonomy through a feminist activist ethnographic account of grassroots accompaniment practices in support of women seeking abortions in Tijuana, Mexico. Historically, feminist demands for abortion rights in Mexico have drawn on liberal feminist notions of choice and international frameworks of human rights. These demands focus on personal agency and locate bodily autonomy as contingent on the state through favorable legislation and public abortion services. Yet new generations of feminists, who operate in complex contexts of structural violence, seek to remove abortion entirely from the purview of the state. By providing information and medication so women can safely induce their own abortions, these feminists focus on how abortions are carried out and in doing so expand understandings of bodily autonomy beyond the conditionality of liberal choice and what the state makes (im)possible. I utilize the decolonial Latin American feminist concepts of cuerpo-territorio (body-territory) and poner el cuerpo (to put one's body on the line) to argue that autonomy in the context of accompaniment practice can be understood as a relational process that creates subjectivities through collective, tactical, embodied, and loving abortion care and pushes back against the structural and pervasive violent control of women's bodies.