Mexican feminists take direct action for reproductive justice

Sol Ureiro, a communitarian feminist in Mexico City, holds a green kerchief against her chest. The green kerchief is a symbol of the struggle for the right to choose. Photo: Silvana Flores, 2022. 

Reportage • Dawn Marie Paley • June 23, 2023 • Leer en castellano

It has been one year since Roe v. Wade was overturned in the United States, and almost two since Mexico’s Supreme Court voted unanimously to decriminalize abortion. Far from monolithic policies, on both sides of the border access to legal abortion is a complex patchwork that varies greatly from state to state and between cities and rural areas. 

“Legality is not synonymous with justice, it’s not synonymous with a right being guaranteed,” said Laura Hernández Esquivel, a member of the Acompañantes Laguna collective in Torreón, Coahuila. Acompañantes Laguna is one of dozens of autonomous collectives that works to provide access to abortion with pills and challenge regressive laws and social stigma.

Over the past seven years, feminists clad in green kerchiefs have led the push for safe, legal and free abortion throughout much of Latin America. They’ve mobilized by the tens of thousands in the streets, lobbied and worked to pressure congress and the courts, and created collectives to ensure abortion with pills is available to anyone who needs it.

Rollbacks and advances

One year after Roe, abortion is illegal in fifteen US states, many of which have introduced a total ban on the practice. In Mexico, eleven states have decriminalized abortion (often in the first trimester) as required by the Supreme Court, while twenty one states have yet to do so. Ending a pregnancy that results from sexual violence is legal—but far from guaranteed—nationwide.

For anti-rights extremists in the US rolling back Roe v. Wade is not enough. Their power—especially in state legislatures and in the courts—mean sexual and reproductive education and health remain under attack. 

Earlier this year a district court in Texas invalidated the Food and Drug Administration’s approval of Mifepristone, one of two medications used to induce abortion. The ruling was later rejected by the Supreme Court, but there are likely to be future attempts to prohibit access and mailing of abortion pills. Activists in the US are currently working to enshrine access to birth control on a state-by-state level, as the right to contraception is potentially also under threat.

By comparison, in Mexico, Mifepristone is available by prescription in Mexico City only, and access to Misoprostol is increasingly controlled at local pharmacies. Contraceptives are available without a prescription throughout the country.

There’s no doubt that legal reversals in the US are a major blow to reproductive rights. But decades of organizing in adverse conditions have given activists in Mexico important insights into the importance of continuous grassroots activism, whatever way the mainstream political winds are blowing.

The latest wave of feminist mobilizations draw on a longer trajectory in the struggle for reproductive justice and the right to choose. Due to the unflinching activism of feminists in Mexico City, abortion until 12 weeks became legal there in 2007.

As legal access has expanded, the work of autonomous collectives that distribute pills and accompany people through home abortions has increased. By way of example, abortion is decriminalized in the state of Coahuila, but Hernández Esquivel says the service is routinely denied, difficult to access, and rife with discrimination. 

In addition to acquiring and mailing or delivering pills to people wishing to end a pregnancy and accompanying them—in person, by phone, or online—through the process, Acompañantes Laguna is active in public education, in policy spaces, and in marches and street mobilizations for reproductive, gender and sexual rights. 

“When decriminalization happened our sense was that we’d have even more work, and that’s how it’s been,” said Hernández Esquivel. “Today we accompany a lot more [abortions], but we have also been learning more about the needs and the experiences of women and people who can gestate, which has allowed us to become more educated about accompanying in specific situations, like accompanying lesbian women, bisexuals and pansexuals who wish to have an abortion, or transmen and people who are non-binary.”

The activists I spoke to for this piece agreed that stigma, the lack of scientific information and moralistic views remain key barriers to sexual and reproductive justice in Mexico. 

Harm reduction and reproductive justice

“There’s an intersection between the right to choice and prohibited substances, which I think has to do with things that are really basic, like our right to autonomy and our right to decide if we want to use substances, or end a pregnancy,” said Perla Martínez from the Las Borders collective in Mexicali. “And in one way or another, the state is basically immersed in prohibition.”

Though the notion of harm reduction is traditionally used in conjunction with HIV prevention and management and the use of prohibited substances, it is increasingly relevant to the way feminists are thinking about reproductive rights.

In Michoacán, abortion is illegal except in cases of sexual violence or non consensual insemination. Even then, few government facilities are equipped to perform the procedure. 

Perla Vázquez is a feminist and abortion rights activist based in Morelia, Michoacán, who was active in the struggle for free, safe and legal abortion in Mexico City in the early aughts. She describes how aspiration abortions have the fewest side effects, but that technology is patented and expensive, and it is not available outside of private clinics in Mexico City. 

As an advocate and activist for reproductive justice, Vázquez approaches abortion as a means of harm and risk reduction, and she does so from an anti-colonial perspective.

“If you’re not in the global north or in a capital city, the possibility of accessing substances that are less harmful to your body, that allow for more autonomy in a way that is less morally charged is reduced,” she said. 

“For me these substances are deeply linked to colonialism, with the colonial relations between women from the global north and south, with women from the peripheries, from the border, and with women who are personally or collectively in transit or in a process of transition,” said Vázquez.

Feminists along the border have increasingly faced shortages of the pills needed for medical abortions, even in places where abortion is legal. 

“In terms of the supplies we need, we look for alliances with organizations who can get us mifepristone and misoprostol for cheaper, or access it when we can’t,” said Martínez in a phone interview from her home in Mexicali. “I see organizations that work on harm reduction in Baja California doing the same to be able to access syringes or Naloxone, because the state refuses to do so.”

Martínez said Mexico underwent a national shortage of Mifepristone last year, during which the government of Baja California referred people seeking abortion to the Las Borders collective to receive the service. 

“How is it possible that the state doesn’t have the supplies and a collective that’s not even legally constituted does?” asked Martínez. “I think the same thing happens with groups that work on harm reduction, the government doesn’t have Naloxone, and they tell people to go and get Naloxone from community organizations because they’re the ones that have it.”

Another similarity between harm and risk reduction practices and the work of abortion collectives is the emphasis on autonomous support networks and mutual aid, regardless of the legal status of the substance in question. 

“In terms of harm reduction in the use of psychoactive substances, we try and create peer networks among users so that they can care for each other and have their own support networks,” said Amaya Ordorika from the ReverdeSer Collective in Mexico City. 

Angie de la Rosa Palafox and Carolina Gálvez from Green Tide Guerrero took portraits of each other which they hold in Chilpancingo, Guerrero. Photo by Silvana Flores, 2022.

Organizing across issues

Though a Supreme Court ruling decriminalized abortion in Mexico, access is far from consolidated. Reproductive justice activists and advocates continue to organize in contexts where the practice is legal, as well as in states where it is still prohibited. 

Their work has inspired and informed other struggles against prohibition and in favor of bodily autonomy and—importantly—pleasure.

“It’s social protest, and broad political organization, the networks that are built that generate political space,” said Ordorika, who is the co-founder of ReverdeSer, which organizes for the rights of drug users and against militarized prohibition and the war on drugs in Mexico.

The combination of street level actions, like marches and demonstrations, but also months—and even years long—occupations and sit-ins are key components of forcing legislators to act on ending prohibition, be it of psychoactive substances or of the right to abortion.

Ordorika says a three year sit-in at the senate for cannabis regulation combined with a series of supreme court rulings in favor of cannabis users were instrumental in creating the space to move forward with legislation, which has yet to be adopted. 

ReverdeSer’s work connects to other feminist anti-prohibitionist spaces in Latin America, the creation of which have been spearheaded by women in Brazil. And though their focus is on narcotics, reproductive justice is a current that flows through all kinds of feminist organizing.

“In discussing substance use and abortion—and not just abortion but sexual and reproductive rights more generally—as soon as gender is introduced, the centrality of the right to pleasure disappears,” said Ordorika. who suggests bringing pleasure and enjoyment into focus could help lift these struggles. 

The women at the forefront of the fight for reproductive justice in Mexico are organizing to distribute and teach others how to administer medical abortions, but they are also active in streets, classrooms and courts. Increasingly, they are showing a path forward that connects reproductive rights to ongoing work against state violence and the criminalization that stems from prohibition.