Until 2017, Chile’s abortion laws remained among the most draconian and restrictive in the world. The dozens of interviews that Michele Eggers-Barison conducted between 2011 and 2014 reveal how the criminalization of abortion and the construction of women as criminals went hand in hand—and both shaped and sustained structural, cultural, and direct forms of violence against women. Eggers-Barison uncovers the narratives of economically disadvantaged, Indigenous, and immigrant women who broke the Chilean law by terminating a pregnancy. Their stories reveal how laws and policies that regulate and control women’s reproductive lives also construct women as criminals. As Eggers-Barison shows, systems of inequality legitimize and sustain harmful attitudes and practices while creating concrete expressions of discrimination and other forms of violence against women. Their experience with abortion remains hidden within spaces of illegality and only becomes visible due to health or legal consequences. Yet despite the obstacles, women used individual and collective forms of group action to resist anti-abortion laws. Timely and vivid, Criminalization of Women shows how abortion’s illegality inscribes itself on a woman’s body and reality.

Michele Eggers-Barison is an associate professor in the School of Social Work at California State University, Chico.