What does the feminist struggle (for abortion legalization) alert us?

Abstract

In times of feminist struggle for the legalization of abortion in Brazil, it is still common to hear that abortion - a practice that has always happened and will continue to happen despite of any law - is a public health problem. Indeed it is, but it should not be circumscribed solely by this bias. For this reason, this article tries to show what the feminist struggle for legalization has warned us about: abortion is inscribed as a life politics. Abortion affirms life because it escapes from the deadly segments that structure the imposition of maternity on women. Faced with the absence of the guarantee of the right to a voluntary, safe and socially supported maternity for all, we think about reproductive hierarchies and subalternized maternities, crossed by race, class, generation/age, and sexual partnership. Through the history of abortion in the US, we raise the alarm about women's reproductive processes, including compulsory sterilizations, in a feminism captured by bourgeois whiteness, because racism and slavery gave/share very specific contours to the issue of abortion in the world: it appears as resistance and refusal to reproduce in such barbaric conditions. The concept of reproductive justice, from the experience of women of color, helps us reflect on the oppressions that intersect with gender. We conclude by thinking about the experiences of groups of feminist women who, in the struggle against coloniality, dedicate themselves to accompanying self-managed abortions, at home, with access to safe medicines and information, opposing the idea of "trauma" commonly associated with abortion.