Disciplinary medical discourses and emotional experiences of pharmacological abortion in Cuyo, Argentina.

Abstract

Objectives

The aim of this article is to recognize and understand how certain discourses and practices carried out by health professionals and sonographers shape the emotional experiences of women who aborted with medication in two provinces of Cuyo, Argentina.

Method

The research was carried out with a qualitative design through a biographical method and thematic life-stories that emphasize the experience with medical abortion in conditions where abortion is legally and socially restricted. For this research, 18 in-depth interviews were conducted and analysed with women who underwent at least one voluntary pharmacological abortion made in a clandestine way between 2010 and 2019 and who registered interactions with professionals. The interviews were conducted between 2016 and 2019.

Results

Criminalizing, disciplinary and/or normativizing discourses implemented through direct and indirect actions affected the configuration of women's emotional experiences. The emotional effects of clandestinity were reinforced: they intensified the fear for their own lives and the fear of being denounced and imprisoned; promoted feelings of vulnerability, uncertainty, lack of control over one’s life, persecution and imposed certain silences. Conversely, moralizing and blaming discourses did not have said effects on the women interviewed.

Conclusions

These interventions are strategies of gender discipline that produce and reproduce criminalizing power practices and that have a central role in the experiences of women: said discourses affect negatively their emotional health; they push them to take avoidable risks and they violently limit their right to an integral health. Nonetheless, they do not take away women’s power to make decisions about their own body.