Espanta Ciguenas: Race and Abortion in the US-Mexico Borderlands Winner of the 2023 Catharine Stimpson Prize for Outstanding Feminist Scholarship

In this essay, I draw from reproductive justice theory, arguing for greater analyses of reproductive health histories through an intersectional feminist lens. Decentering US-centric reproductive rights histories and paying special attention to race, class, and gender helps unravel the intricate narrative that tied abortion providers in northern Mexico to a racialist logic of danger, dirt, and death in the years before Roe v. Wade. These logics were deployed by doctors, attorneys, and activists in the United States as justification for the legalization of abortion. By tackling the history of anti-Mexican racism and racialist images of the borderlands region itself, using oral histories as well as patient and doctor testimonials, this article is a counternarrative to the myths about Mexican abortions before 1973. Using feminist, antiracist analysis, this article also adds to abortion travel scholarship, opening new pathways for research about reproductive health-care migrants and providers in the global South.