In this concise yet informative volume, Nora E. Jaffary provides a broad overview of the history of abortion in Mexico from the colonial period to the present. The book focuses primarily on the legal regulation of abortion over time while also touching upon religious attitudes, medical technologies, and changing gender ideologies. Jaffary has three main findings. First, in contrast to popular opinion, abortion was less regulated and condemned over the past five centuries than it is today. This is due in part to the very recent inclusion of fetal rights in debates over abortion’s morality and legality, which is Jaffary’s second finding. Abortion debates in Mexico (and the United States) that juxtapose maternal and fetal rights are a new development. For most of Mexico’s history, women’s sexual honor was more important. Finally, Jaffary ingeniously places the recent expansion of medication abortions (either self- or provider-managed) in a much longer history of medicinal abortive techniques and knowledge that came from Indigenous, European, and African backgrounds.

The book’s emphasis on legal regulation guides its organization, with chapters in chronological order by legal regime. The first chapter takes on the longest timeframe, running from the colonial period to the establishment of the country’s first penal code in 1871. Despite radical changes, such as the end of colonial rule, the legal regulation of abortion—and women’s practices—did not change much over nearly five centuries. The public mainly shied away from denouncing abortion and women relied on plant-based methods. Although lay and religious authorities condemned abortion in their writings, this condemnation did not result in increased prosecution. In the second chapter, which covers the period from 1871 to 1931, Jaffary argues for “dramatic change in abortion practice and penalization” (9). The 1871 code both modernized laws around abortion by including provisions for legal abortions when the mother’s life was in danger and maintained colonial-era ideas about women’s sexual honor. The public also began to take a more critical stance, with denunciation rates increasing. The last major change occurred in the medical field, with many Mexican physicians developing and fully supporting surgical techniques. For Mexicanists, this chapter presents a chronological intervention by showing that the Porfiriato (1876–1910) and the revolutionary period (1910–1940) represented continuity rather than change when approached through the lens of abortion history. In the last chapter, Jaffary analyzes the era from the 1931 postrevolutionary penal code, which included an allowance for rape in its provisions on legal abortions, to 2007, when Mexico City legalized the procedure in the first trimester. Over this final period, legal regulations went mainly unchanged. However, around the mid-century, physicians began vocally condemning abortion, a major change from their earlier support for and practice of surgical abortions. Jaffary argues that a possible reason for this shift was the increasing state incorporation of the medical profession at a time of state conservatism, driven partly by an ideological reconciliation with the Catholic Church. In the second half of the century, Jaffary finds increasing feminist organization in support of abortion access and a subsequent Catholic (and later evangelical) backlash against feminist actions. In the last decades of the twentieth century, fetal rights also became an important part of antiabortion activism. What is lacking from this analysis is any discussion of the role of technology, particularly the ultrasound, in the rise of fetal rights.

Relying on criminal trials from various national and state archives, medical sources (including textbooks, dissertations, and articles), and religious publications from the Vatican, the Catholic Church in Mexico, and lay entities, the book expertly explores the multifaceted history of abortion in Mexico. It also provides a blueprint for those working on histories of reproduction, specifically abortion, who see their work as important correctives to current false narratives on abortion’s history. As Jaffary concludes, “One of the powerful ways the past shapes the present is that it operates, rhetorically, as a great legitimizer… Part of the job of a historian is to uncover and dismantle those moments when our assumptions about the practices of the past, or the reasons why they occurred, are inaccurate” (122).