US Feminists Look to Latin America for Models to Resist Abortion Bans

As U.S. residents prepare for the start of a new Trump administration, we face increasing threats to health and bodily autonomy, especially for people facing unwanted pregnancies. Currently, 12 states have completely banned abortion, an additional six states have imposed bans within the first trimester and 19 states impose restrictions specifically on medication abortions.

In spite of expanding restrictions, the overall rate of abortions has increased nationally, as clinicians in states that allow abortion expand services to meet the needs of people traveling to find care. Meanwhile, an unknowable number of people with unwanted pregnancies have taken abortion pills to end a pregnancy safely and effectively in the privacy of their own home, a friend’s home or another safe space — a practice known as self-managed abortion (SMA).

The experience of feminists and people with unwanted pregnancies across Latin America offers models of solidarity-based community support and care that enable safe, secure and effective medication abortion outside the medical system. Activists in Latin America and other places where abortion is restricted have created websites with information on how to use abortion pills correctly, phone hotlines that someone can call with questions, and accompaniment groups that will stay in contact with someone through their self-managed abortion to reduce isolation and offer support.

Feminist networks, long active across the Global South, regularly cross borders to engage in evidence-based health practices that enable bodily autonomy in the face of right-wing assaults. These networks and their accumulated knowledge began to cross the U.S.-Mexico border in the fall of 2021, after Texas banned abortion after six weeks, and these ties have expanded and strengthened since the U.S. Supreme Court’s Dobbs decision overturned Roe v. Wade in June 2022. North American feminists and community health activists have much to learn from the Global South about how to enable autonomy and safety in face of legal restrictions, and have already begun to adapt the experience of Latin American activists to conditions in the U.S. The results of these alliances can be seen in abortion statistics that reflect the quiet work of feminists across the U.S. and into Mexico, and the demonstrable success of these networks has led to escalating repression that now includes the expansion of the “war on drugs” to include abortion medication.

Global South Feminist Solidarity

A study of abortion methods in the wake of Dobbs unsurprisingly found an increase in medication abortions, but in the majority of cases, abortion pills were obtained through community networks rather than telemedicine services or clinics. This suggests the increase in the abortion rate may be significantly higher than is apparent from data-based on clinical services, but more importantly emphasizes the centrality of grassroots activist networks in maintaining access to abortion, especially in states with restrictions. It demonstrates that abortion advocates in the U.S. have been learning from feminists in Latin America and across the Global South, where community-based support for and assistance with medication abortion has become a safe and efficacious, as well as widespread way of having an abortion in restrictive contexts.

In September 2021, after Texas imposed a ban on abortion after six weeks of gestation, Mexican abortion activists publicly offered to support Texans who need an abortion, and alliances formed between feminist activists on both sides of the border to facilitate access to SMA in the U.S. For example, I was part of a meeting among feminists in the U.S. and Mexico at the end of February 2022. These coalitions have expanded significantly in the wake of the Dobbs decision, and, as the data above indicates, SMA with pills provided through community networks has become an ever more common way to access abortion in the U.S. Any increase in risk to maternal health comes from the reduction in OB/GYN care in states with abortion bans, not from SMA.

These international alliances, strengthened since Dobbs, continue to share knowledge, support and resources, including abortion pills which are available over the counter in Mexico. The meeting I attended in early 2022 was the first of many, and the most visible of the Mexican organizations, Las Libres, has developed a U.S. branch that shares knowledge, pills and support with people facing an undesired pregnancy in the U.S. It is not possible to know the source(s) of the pills distributed through community networks, but virtually all were likely manufactured in India, which produces the vast majority of the high-quality generic medicines available in the Global South.

The community networks in the U.S. have adapted and built on the experience of feminist activists in Mexico and other parts of the world; there are now two hotlines in the U.S. that provide information and support for SMA, one staffed by trained community activists and one by volunteer medical staff, as well as doulas and others who offer forms of accompaniment even in — or especially in — more vulnerable contexts. The website Plan C, which functions as a clearinghouse of information and links on SMA in the U.S., was founded by feminists with experience working on SMA in sub-Saharan Africa.

Abortion Bans and Drug War Language

The consequences of an abortion ban, whether absolute or by gestational age, reach far into medical practice as well as individual lives, transforming elements of basic medical care into legal minefields. At least three women have died in Texas from delays and/or denials of treatment for miscarriage due to medical providers’ fears of being prosecuted for performing abortions. In addition, two women in Georgia died from complications related to medication abortions after being denied timely access to simple emergency care that would have saved their lives because of the state’s ban on abortions after six weeks. All of these deaths were easily preventable with basic medical care that can be provided at any emergency room, but miscarriage management is essentially a form of abortion which can leave medical personnel immobilized in the collision between medical practice and legal threat.

The right has also begun to deploy misleading language and failed policy from the war on drugs to describe self-managed abortion care. In May 2024, Louisiana classified mifepristone, an essential abortion drug, as a controlled substance, which is the same general area of law used to categorize heroin, fentanyl and cocaine. Texas has already proposed a similar law, and others may follow suit in the coming years. While mifepristone was scheduled in a lower level than the opiates and cocaine, this legally locates the medication within criminal law and not simply regulated through prescription laws. The anti-abortion far right takes this a step further by labeling community networks that share abortion pills as an “abortion pill cartel,” invoking language and imagery ordinarily associated with large-scale trafficking of drugs like fentanyl and methamphetamine.

This latest strategy for criminalizing abortion medication brings together racism, xenophobia, and misogyny in an attempt to instigate drug-war style criminalization of reproductive justice activists as they support people seeking abortions in both the U.S. and Mexico. This will not only amplify the legal risks facing activists who support people seeking abortions, but may also expose feminists doing community-based health work to the violence of militarized, cross-border law enforcement, all for sharing knowledge and medication classified as “essential” by the World Health Organization.

The war on drugs has done incalculable harm to communities of color and working-class communities of all races in the U.S., while fomenting ever more extreme violence across parts of Latin America. Drug classification and control have a long history in the U.S. as racist strategy of social control, which escalated into mass incarceration after President Richard Nixon declared a war on drugs that subsequently grew under Presidents Ronald Reagan and Bill Clinton. The wealth, power and violence of the narco-trafficking networks in Mexico and other parts of Latin America derive from U.S. prohibitionist drug policies coupled with insatiable U.S. demand. The cross-border solidarity among feminists and people seeking abortions could not be farther from the rapacious world of narcotics trafficking.

This attempt to expand racist drug control strategies onto abortion pills is a clear indication of the desperation, racism and misogyny of the anti-abortion far right. Abortion pills have a better safety profile than Tylenol, and generic medications like those sold in Mexican pharmacies meet global pharmaceutical manufacturing standards. The use of “drug cartel” to describe networks of community-based feminist health activists appears simultaneously terrifying and absurd. In the coming years, it will be vital to resist these disinformation strategies that warp reality through outright lies as well as threats by association. Feminists throughout the Americas, North as well as South, have long experience with xenophobic racism and the distortions of right-wing propaganda, and will continue to build alliances based in justice to create a world that values solidarity and bodily autonomy.