This talk considers the experiences of public clinicians who have been tasked with transforming abortion rights into concrete forms of care in the aftermath of Mexico City's historic 2007 abortion reform. Drawing on over a year of ethnographic research in ILE clinics, Dr. Singer explores the ethical quandaries and practical challenges that accompany such an uneasy translation. Rather than emboldening women to exercise their reproductive rights in accordance with activist agendas, the ILE personnel saw their role in the clinic as an occasion to foster personal and collective responsibility among their patients. Providers called on women to avoid abortion to protect the vitality of Mexican society and its precious collective resources.
As a medical anthropologist, Dr. Elyse Singer's research and teaching explore bioethical conflicts at the beginning and end of life to engage wider disciplinary conversations about dignity, inequality, moral personhood, and sociopolitical belonging. To date, her work has coalesced around two ethnographic projects in Mexico on abortion and passive euthanasia. Dr. Singer's research has been supported by the National Science Foundation, the Wenner-Gren Foundation for Anthropological Research, and the American Association for University Women. She has published articles in journals such as Medical Anthropology Quarterly; Culture, Medicine and Psychiatry; Culture, Health and Sexuality; and other venues. And her first book, Lawful Sins: Abortion Rights and Reproductive Governance in Mexico, was recently published with Stanford University Press in spring 2022. Her book was recently recognized with honorable mention for the Eileen Basker Memorial Prize by the Society for Medical Anthropology, awarded for scholarship that makes a significant contribution to the analysis of gender and health.