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Abortion and Infanticide

The history of infanticide and abortion in Latin America has garnered increasing attention in the past two decades. Particularities of topic and temporal focus characterize this work and shape this bibliography’s geographic organization. Mexico possesses the most developed scholarship in both the colonial and modern periods. There, tracing of the persistence of pre-Conquest Indigenous medical knowledge and the endurance of paraprofessional obstetrical practitioners through the colonial era and into the 19th century features prominently and echoes some of the scholarship examining European midwives’ administration of plant-based abortifacients in the medieval and Early Modern eras. This topic plays a role, but a much less prominent one in scholarship on Colombia, Peru, and Brazil. Scholars of Brazil, the Caribbean, and circum-Caribbean have focused in particular on the issue of enslaved mothers’ commission of infanticide and abortion on their own children in the 18th and 19th centuries, a particularly fraught issue in the context of the abolition of the slave trade. A central assumption in much scholarship on the 19th-century professionalization (and masculinization) of obstetrical medicine is that the marginalization of midwives entailed a reduction in women’s access to abortion, although this position has been challenged in some recent scholarship on 19th-century Mexico in particular. The examination of the ways that the new republics perceived the crimes of infanticide and abortion in their legal codes, judicial processes, and in community attitudes is a central focus of 19th- and 20th-century scholarship. Scholars have remarked upon the considerable uniformity across all regions of a paucity of denunciations or convictions in the first half of the 19th century and the rise of criminal trials for both crimes in its last three decades. This change coincided (although no one has argued been provoked by) many countries’ issuance of national penal codes in the 1870s and 1880s. This intensification of persecution also coincided with the Catholic church’s articulation of an explicit condemnation of abortion (Pius IX’s 1869 bull Apostolicae Sedis), although demonstrating the concrete implications of this decree to the Latin American setting remains a task yet to be undertaken. Historians of both abortion and infanticide have also concentrated on defendant motives and defenses in criminal investigations. While some highlight defendants’ economic desperation, most scholars argue that the public defense of female sexual honor was a crucial motivator, which courts understood as a legitimate concern in 19th- and even mid-20th-century trials. Scholarship on 20th-century infanticide and abortion history continues to concentrate on fluctuations in attitudes toward honor, gender, and the family as influences on criminal codes and especially judicial sentencing for both acts, and toward the late 20th century on feminist efforts to decriminalize abortion that have met with varied success across countries.