2021 Enloe Award Essay

Revolutionary pills?
Feminist abortion, pharmaceuticalization,
and reproductive governance

This article was named the winner of the 2021 Enloe Award.

The committee commented: This article embodies the spirit of the Enloe Award by helping us conceptualize self-medication abortion as a part of “reproductive governance,” or how multiple actors beyond the state participate in providing and facilitating reproductive health care. This framework is crucial to understanding that access to abortion pills certainly can increase bodily autonomy, illustrating the effectiveness of grassroots feminist activists in meeting the needs of those who wish to terminate pregnancies. At the same time, the manufacturing and distribution of the pills also empower a whole host of actors that promote corporatized care, neoliberal agency, and population management. The article stood out to the committee as an original and exciting feminist intervention in global conversations about abortion access, and we commend the author for the strong theoretical framework, robust methodological approach involving ethnographic research in Mexico, and provocative insights.

ABSTRACT

This article examines two pills that are used to induce abortion in the context of feminist “accompaniment” for self-managed abortion practice in Mexico: misoprostol and mifepristone. For many feminist activists, abortion pills facilitate bodily autonomy in contexts where abortion is legally and socially criminalized. However, my ethnographic research demonstrates that pills are also “territorialized” through assemblages of pharmaceuticalized medicine, where private-sector and civil-society organizations have become protagonists in the provision of abortion health care and the governance of reproductive conduct. Feminist abortion accompaniment works to remedy these limitations by “reterritorializing” pills into new assemblages with practices grounded in principles of solidarity, justice, and bodily autonomy. It is only through these practices that abortion pills become truly revolutionary.

Author Madeleine Belfrage (she/her/hers)