Bodies in Dispute

Drawing on extensive, in-depth ethnographic work in Mexico, Madeleine Belfrage demonstrates in this open access book how Global-North-dominated reproductive health programs help to govern women’s bodies and how Latin American feminists are responding with new, innovative ideas and routes to abortion access.

Belfrage takes us on a journey through abortion access routes in Mexico, where the state refuses to guarantee access to abortion and women face intense gendered violence and other structural barriers. Here, we find, grassroots feminist activists are operating outside international reproductive health programs to provide information and pills so people can carry out abortions safely at home. By using Latin-American grassroots feminist concepts to understand these practices, Belfrage helps decolonize Global-North-dominated understandings of bodily autonomy and abortion care, and ultimately turns a critical eye to the ways the very systems that seek to advance women’s rights risk undermining reproductive freedom. In so doing, she makes important, globally relevant interventions into debates around abortion politics, reproductive justice, and bodily autonomy.

At a time when abortion access is facing new restrictions throughout the world—including in places such as the US, which used to offer better protections—this book could not be more timely or necessary.

The ebook editions of this book are available open access under a CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 licence on bloomsburycollections.com. Open access was funded by the Bloomsbury Open Collections Library Collective.