Archaeologies of the Body: Imagining Abortion Care with Feminist Acompañantes in Mexico

Abstract

This essay considers abortion politics as a struggle over our collective conditions of life and death. It brings the perspectives of feminist acompañantes in Mexico City and Xalapa, Veracruz, to bear on critical questions about forms of life, loss, care, and time. Although abortion is legal during the first twelve weeks of pregnancy in Mexico City and now in eight other states across the country, a powerful and diffuse feminist movement continues to grow adjacent to the law, building an autonomous sphere of collective practice. Within this movement, acompañantes—or abortion doulas—are creating an anticapitalist ethics of care and a political vocabulary that grapples with how to imagine futures amid proximity to death.