Permitting and Prohibiting Abortion in Mexico, 1871-1952 | Dr. Nora E. Jaffary

Department Seminar Series, 2022-23
Department of History
Queen's University, Kingston ON
November 24, 2022
"Permitting and Prohibiting Abortion in Mexico, 1871-1952" with Dr. Nora E. Jaffary
This talk uses judicial sources, medical texts, and newspaper sources to address some aspects of the surprising history of abortion form the late nineteenth century to the mid twentieth century. In this period, the practice of abortion had greater medical and legal acceptance in medical, legal, and even ecclesiastical circles in much of Mexico than was the case in more recent decades in much of the country, outside of Mexico City.
Nora E. Jaffary is a Professor in the History Department at Concordia University. Dr. Jaffary is a Latin Americanist whose research focuses on social and gender history in colonial and nineteenth-century Mexico. Her book, Reproduction and Its Discontents in Mexico: Childbirth and Contraception from 1750 to 1905 (UNC-Chapel Hill, 2016) examining midwifery, monstrous births, infanticide, abortion and the emergence of Mexican obstetrics, won the Canadian Historical Association's Wallace K. Ferguson Prize in 2017, and Honorable Mention for the Latin American Studies Association's Howard F. Cline Book Prize in Mexican History in 2018. She is currently at work on a book treating the history of abortion in Mexico.