Abstract

In the aftermath of the Mexican Revolution of 1910-1920, the question of abortion became a cause of worry in the intellectual circles of Mexico City. Many reasons explain the heightened concern about women's reproductive functions: Mexican authorities' project to reconstruct and modernize the nation, the rise of eugenics, and a generalized concern about the country’s population decline. However, historiography does not stress enough how diverse the discourses on abortion were in the period from 1930 to 1940. Highlighting this period of diversity is the objective of this thesis. Even if the Catholic Church – which continued to exert much influence on social mores despite the post-revolutionary government's anticlerical stance – was strictly antiabortionist, more moderate positionings permeated the publications of the period. Demands for changes in the laws of abortion were relatively common among legal and medical professionals, and more radical propositions for the legalization of abortion had some traction amongst Mexican thinkers, especially in the 1930s.
Factors such as university autonomy, the spread of anti-capitalist and feminist ideologies, and the government’s professed anticlericalism contributed to the relative freedom of individuals to express divergent opinions on abortion policies. However, these conditions began to change by the end of the decade. I posit that by the end of the 1930s, both the Ley General de Población of 1936 and the end of the Lázaro Cárdenas administration marked a shift to a more unitarian discourse on the question, with strict pronatalist positioning becoming the norm among Mexican institutions.