Embodying Inequality: The Criminalization of Women for Abortion in Chile (WITHDRAWN)

Background and Purpose:

Based on over a year of fieldwork in Chile this research examined how women embody being criminalized for abortion in the context of structural, cultural, and direct forms of violence. A large portion of Chilean women lack access to basic health care and under restrictive reproductive health policies are forced to terminate unwanted pregnancies in unsafe and illegal conditions. As Chilean Congress moves forward with legislative debates on decriminalizing abortion, this research was politically well timed to help reveal the impact of reproductive health inequities on women in Chile.

Methods:

Forty formal semi-structured and in-depth interviews were conducted in total with thirty-six participants. Twenty-five semi-structured interviews were conducted with participants affiliated with religious and academic institutions and legal, public health, economic, feminist, human rights, and community organizations. Eleven in-depth interviews were conducted with women about their abortion experience. Four of the eleven women were invited for second interviews in order to delve deeper into the phenomena being studied.

Ethnographic observation was employed through attending marches, conferences, seminars, and community and cultural events focusing on aspects of race, class, and/or gender inequality and intersected with issues of the decriminalization of abortion; women’s, indigenous, and immigrant rights; poverty; torture and disappearances; and violence against women.

Historical archives, human rights documents, and research reports were reviewed, as well as print media and documentaries.

Results:

Galtung’s typology of violence aided as a model to identify and deconstruct reproductive inequality in its complexity. Structural violence helped to situate the social construction of laws and policies in historic and contemporary economic and political processes that regulate and control women’s reproductive lives. Cultural violence facilitated an understanding of how systems of inequality are legitimized and sustained, reinforcing permissive harmful attitudes and practices toward women most marginalized. Direct violence illustrated how structural and cultural violence manifest as concrete expressions of discrimination and emotional, sexual, and physical violence against women.

The embodied realities for women who had terminated a pregnancy encompassed complex layers of inequality. Women’s bodies were marked by cultural discourse, relegating women to the margins of society, which defined women’s agency, identity, and displacement. In their abortion experience, women expressed embodying violence, fear, silence, isolation, and the internalization of the dominant cultural discourse.

Conclusions and Implications:

This study underscored participant narratives as central to informing our professional knowledge base. In response to the social exclusion and marginalization in which women’s lives are reduced by the criminalization of abortion, it is important to foster a space of critical reflection to make visible the multiple harmful power mechanisms impacting women’s reproductive health and rights.

The role of social work in reproductive health, rights, and justice is vital on practice, policy, and research levels. Social workers can challenge a criminal justice paradigm as a response to social issues; understand the conditions that affect women’s reproductive health, such as poverty and discrimination; and employ multiple strategies to deal with the impact of illegality on the people we serve and the limitations criminalization produces on our capacity to help.