Luisa's Ghosts: Haunted Legality and Collective Expressions of Pain

Feminist health care providers have debated the efficacy of the decriminalization of abortion in Mexico City. Luisa, a counselor in a private clinic, suggested that while the law has expanded the visibility of, and access to safe abortion, it has also called forth "other ghosts." In this article, I take Luisa's critical perspective as a starting point for examining ongoing criminalization and moral stigma as forms of haunting that arise in the wake of the Mexico City abortion policy. Drawing on ethnographic research, I explore how Luisa's ghosts materialize in the embodied- affective relations between patients in new legal clinics. Women who attend public clinics negotiate moral stigma along with religious and familial pressures in the ways they suffer, as well as normalize abortion as a painful experience. Rather than approach pain as purely a sign of victimization, I suggest that its expression constitutes an effervescent collectivity between women in the clinic, making explicit, while at the same time dissipating, an intractable moral-affective knot that might otherwise be ignored.