Temporalities of Exception: Abortion Law, Feminist Advocacy, and Clinical Intervention in Mexico City

This dissertation explores how low-income women and feminist activists negotiate Mexico City’s public abortion program against a backdrop of criminalization. In April of 2007, reforms to the Federal District Penal Code and Health Law outlined a regulatory framework for the Legal Interruption of Pregnancy (Interrupción Legal del Embarazo/ILE). While the Mexico City reforms, based on a broader social policy of the right to health, were designed to foster access for low-income women, they coincided with the severe criminalization of abortion practices across the country. Countering the reforms, eighteen states made laws to protect “life at the moment of conception,” giving constitutional backing to new techniques of policing and prosecution. Rather than characterize Mexico City as a liberal exception within an otherwise conservative Catholic country, this dissertation examines how governmental rationalities of criminalization and health intervention are entangled in the clinical setting. Drawing on the “awkward proximity” of feminist advocacy and ethnographic research, I focus on the brief affective encounters between women travelling from other states and acompañantes (advocates or companions) that facilitate access to public clinics in Mexico City. Four chapters examine how the “exceptional legality” of abortion in Mexico City shapes trajectories of access and the texture of public clinic care, the gendered discourses of poverty and kinship mobilized in abortion debates, and the temporalities of feminist political action within this juridical-clinical landscape