Criminalization of abortion in the city of Córdoba (1887-1922): a case study

Abstract

My aim is to analyze the characteristics and representations of abortive practices in Córdoba city at the beginning of the 20th century, associating them with an emerging and progressive criminalization of abortion. In that sense, I believe that the abortion matter is inextricably related with a national-level process called women maternalization, which constructs women unequivocally as mothers. I will focus on a particular period which is anchored in the state legal culture and which includes from the year 1887 to the year 1922. My setting of this period’s start and end points answers, on the one hand, to the sanctioning of the Penal Code and to the establishment of abortion as a “crime against a person”. On the other hand, it answers to the Penal Code reform that modified the treatment of this matter. Within this time span, I could register, in Córdoba city, the first legal cases entitled “abortion”, which could allow my approaching of the popular culture. In this way, I have detected two conflicting areas when it comes to the administration of justice: the state’s legal culture, drawn up by state officers, criminal legal experts and social communicators who sanction and interpret legal standards, establish legal procedures and present the dangers that criminal actions pose to society; and the popular culture, which has its own conceptions about such legal standards. In this article, I will make a thorough analysis of a judicial file dealing with the open court case of a woman accused of “being the presumptive perpetrator of a violent abortion.” Such case allows us to reflect about the emerging and increasingly condemning character of attitudes towards the practice of abortion and about the ambiguities and blurry limits between abortion and infanticide, and between spontaneous and induced abortion. At the same time, the file constitutes an access door for us into the formulation of different discourses that bring tension to the conflictive abovementioned relationships. In this way, expert propositions (the judge, the prosecutor, doctors, among others) become involved with layman ones (the accused woman, neighbors, etc.).