Original Research

Making Feminist Selves: Reflections on the Biopolitical Working of Misoprostol in Argentine Abortion Activism

Lea Happ

King’s College London
lea.happ@kcl.ac.uk

Abstract

This article interrogates the role of misoprostol, an abortifacient pharmaceutical, in recent Argentine abortion activism through the lens of biopolitics. For more than three decades, misoprostol has enabled activists to accompany and facilitate self-managed abortions safely in settings where access is restricted. In Argentina, where abortion was legalized in 2021, misoprostol has been harnessed by feminist activists not only as a pharmaceutical technology, but also, as I argue here, a biopolitical one fostering a distinctly feminist “biopolitics from below” (Biehl 2016). Building on an analysis of informative and narrative materials publicized by activist groups, I trace the affective mechanisms by which feminist activists contest hegemonic subjectivities. I focus on feminist knowledge productions about misoprostol and the affective paradigms made possible through them to suggest that its pharmaceutical properties have enabled activist practices that link the commanding of scientific knowledge to the production of political knowledges. Through these practices, feminist activists have turned misoprostol into a technology for shaping counter-hegemonic subjectivities as embodied, affective, and relational.

Keywords

misoprostol, pharmaceutical abortion, feminist activism, affect, counter-hegemonic subjectivity, feminist knowledge production, Argentina

Introduction

Misoprostol has played a key role in the history of Latin American abortion activism. The pharmaceutical is used for various obstetric interventions and listed as such on the World Health Organization’s (2023) Model List of Essential Medicines. In abortion care, it is used on its own or in combination with mifepristone. However, originally it was licensed as a prescription drug for treating gastric ulcers (Drovetta 2015). Noticing its abortive side effects, Brazilian women were the first to develop regimes for its safe use in abortion in the 1980s (De Zordo 2016; Freeman and Rodríguez 2022). Since then Latin American activists have used its ready availability to make abortion accessible as widely and safely as possible, despite legal restrictions. From the 1990s, Argentine activists have increasingly relied on misoprostol (McReynolds-Pérez 2014), making illegal abortions safer and enabling new forms of feminist abortion support. In 2009 Lesbians and Feminists for the Decriminalization of Abortion (Lesbianas y Feministas por la Descriminalización del Aborto) launched a phone line sharing instructions for its safe use (Drovetta 2015). Since 2012 Socorristas en Red (feministas y transfeministas que abortamos) (SenRed) has informed and accompanied abortion seekers in and outside the healthcare system (Socorristas en Red n.d.-b).

Beyond medical intervention, the use of misoprostol in self-managed, feminist-accompanied abortion has enabled new imaginations of feminist identity and subjectivity. Based on the analysis of selected informative and narrative materials, I investigate misoprostol as a technology for shaping counter-hegemonic subjectivities. Informative materials include activist groups’ websites, social media accounts, statistics, reports, and abortion guidelines, whereas narrative materials include stories and testimonies of activists’ and abortion seekers’ experiences. Argentine feminist theorists have highlighted the crucial role of affects in altering the political subjecthoods implicated in abortion (Burton 2021; Macón 2021; Solana and Vacarezza 2020; Vacarezza 2018; Vacarezza and Burton 2023). Focusing especially on the affectivity of expertise, solidarity, and joy, I suggest that negative affective paradigms such as shame, guilt, and secrecy are displaced through the generation of more complex affects (Vacarezza and Burton 2023), made possible by activists’ use of misoprostol as a biopolitical technology. I propose feminist “biopolitics from below” (Biehl 2016) as a conceptual tool to understand affective attachments as vehicles for making distinctly feminist selves.

To investigate misoprostol as a technology for shaping dissident bodies, subjectivities, and communities, I first provide a brief discussion of recent interventions into and expansions of Foucauldian biopolitics, especially notions of biopolitics from below emerging in response to the COVID-19 pandemic (Rocca 2021; Samaddar 2023; Sotiris 2020). On this basis, I sketch out my conceptual framework by making the case for the existence and necessity of a distinctly feminist biopolitics from below. Second, I historicize contemporary notions of gendered subjectivity in Argentina, focusing on exclusions from this category based on gender, sexuality, race, and class. Subsequently, I discuss my analysis of informative and narrative productions by various feminist activist groups. I trace how misoprostol, via the production and sharing of knowledge about it and the affective attachments implicated in these practices, functions as a technology for shaping counter-hegemonic subjectivities.

Methodology

This article builds on an analysis of a corpus of informative and narrative materials published by feminist activist groups online. Informative materials include organizations’ websites and social media accounts, statistics, and reports such as SenRed’s Sistematizaciones, published annually since 2015 (Socorristas en Red, n.d.-c), and Proyecto Mirar’s (n.d.-b) post-legalization reports, as well as guidelines such as the sociolinguistic adaptation of abortion protocols into Wichí, Guaraní, Qom, and Mapuzungun published by Catholics for the Right to Choose’s (Católicas por el Derecho a Decidir) Cuerpos y Libertades project (Cuerpos y Libertades, n.d.-a) and Blas Radi and Marina Elichiry’s (n.d.) adaptation of a trans-inclusive abortion manual. These materials allow insight into geographic, economic, racialized, and gendered inequalities shaping abortion experiences. Whilst statistics such as SenRed’s Sistematizaciones attest to the diversity of people seeking abortion care, documents such as the trans-inclusive abortion manual and adapted abortion protocols explore the particular healthcare needs of Indigenous, trans, and gender-nonconforming people.

Narrative materials include SenRed’s Archivo Rosa (n.d.-a), an archive of testimonies by feminist activists of the Socorrista network dated between 2015 and 2019; Estamos Cerca: Relatos de Aborto en Cuarantena (Socorristas en Red n.d 2020a, 2020b, 2020c, 2020d, 2020e), a collection of testimonies by people who aborted in quarantine; as well as Dahiana Belfiori’s (2015) Código Rosa, a collection of stories based on the testimonies of women who were supported by SenRed. They represent a broad range of abortion experiences, with narrators from different socioeconomic backgrounds, locations, and age groups. In Argentina, economic and racialized inequalities are often reflected geographically (Abeles and Villafañe 2022; Lavagna 2024), but as no detailed information about narrators’ identity is provided, the possibility for a thorough intersectional analysis based on these materials is limited.

Focusing on informative and narrative productions created for and shared with a broad audience enables me to trace activists’ representation of their misoprostol-related activism and constructions of counter-hegemonic subjectivities in public forums. To further contextualize these representations, I also consulted official documents, including legal texts and health policy directives. While these materials are situated within longer abortion histories, this article focuses on activism since 2015. I selected this period due to the increased presence and visibility of pharmaceutical abortion and activists accompanying it.

Misoprostol as a Technology for Feminist Biopolitics from Below

For this article, I conceptualize misoprostol as a pharmaceutical and biopolitical technology. I draw on Michel Foucault’s (1990) and Paul B. Preciado’s (2018) theorizings of biopolitics, as well as recent proposals for a biopolitics from below (Biehl 2016; Sotiris 2020; Rocca 2021; Samaddar 2023). Argentina is no exception to the observation that, in the nation-state, sexuality is of “greatest instrumentality” (Foucault 1990, 103) for managing individual bodies and entire populations. Governing reproduction implies managing “reproductive options…and identities available to [gendered subjects], who are often constituted as citizens responsible for reproducing rational social and national bodies” (Morgan and Roberts 2012, 244). Abortion politics have been instrumental to biopolitical population management (Calkin et al. 2022). In Argentina, they are a site of intervention aiming to “maintain the status quo of the familial institution, gender roles and feminine sexuality and corporality” (Flores 2011, 2). For instance, the discursive figure of the unborn child as an object of protection is mobilized to police potentially pregnant bodies (Flores 2011).

Concern with who ought (not) to reproduce is also reflected in Argentina’s 1921 Penal Code, which regulated abortion until 2020. While (mostly) prohibited, abortion was permitted in the case of an “indecent assault committed against an idiot or demented woman” (Art. 86.2).¹ This articulation resonates with wider historical understandings of women’s contribution to society through motherhood. While men emerged as active participants in public life, women were expected to contribute to the family “as the basis of the Argentine nation” (Kerr 2020, 19) as wives and mothers. The continued importance of maternalism is illustrated by the significance of Eva Perón in past and present political imaginations. Evita, herself childless, was “famously worshiped as ‘the mother of the poor’” (Eraso 2013, 1) and continues to be mobilized for diverse political projects, including abortion activism (Sutton and Vacarezza 2020). Echoes of the understanding of motherhood as contribution to the nation and resulting opposition to abortion can be found in contemporary anti-abortion discourses. In a 2024 proposal to suspend the right to legal abortion, deputies of Javier Milei’s La Libertad Avanza argued against abortion because “all members of the political community must take part in both its construction and its enjoyment” (Honorable Cámara de Diputados de la Nación Argentina 2024).

In the context of this social mandate, withholding abortion access affirms and reinforces this normative subjecthood. Controlling abortifacient pharmaceuticals and gatekeeping knowledge about their use may be understood as biopolitical control mechanisms. However, as Preciado (2018) argues, pharmaceutical technologies can also disrupt heteronormative definitions of subjecthood defined by reproduction. While Preciado writes primarily about trans experiences of challenging heterosexist and cisnormative social orders, I argue this framing of technologies as means of making one’s body and self according to personal preference can be transposed to make sense of feminist activist uses of misoprostol. Preciado’s intervention allows the conceptualization of two interconnected facets of misoprostol as a tool for activist alteration of embodied subjectivity: its material impact on the body and, subsequently, its potential for enabling new ways of inhabiting subjectivities. With abortion commonly constructed as a “passive ontological state” (Stabile 1994 quoted in Baird 2001, 209), the convergence of both facets turns misoprostol into a tool for rejecting this passivity. Mirroring trans people’s use of hormones, which Preciado describes as “biopolitical drugs, the access to which cannot be safeguarded by heteronormative state institutions” (2018, 37), misoprostol escapes the control of healthcare institutions to enable material alteration of the body from pregnant to not pregnant.

Feminist interventions made possible through misoprostol can be usefully conceptualized as feminist biopolitics from below. Building on observations of initial COVID-19 measures, Panagiotis Sotiris identifies the need “to rethink questions of health and care, as part of a broader attempt to radically transform social relations” (2020, 25). He proposes democratic biopolitics, or biopolitics from below, as “constant processes of subaltern struggle and confrontation with the limits of contemporary neoliberal states…based upon collective militancy, the democratization of knowledge, and self-organization” (28). Building on this theorization, Facundo Rocca (2021) suggests biopolitics from below constitutes a strategy for challenging biopolitical control through the appropriation of (medical) knowledges from governing institutions.

In the context of Argentine abortion activism, feminists have long engaged in such appropriations and productions of medical knowledge alongside affective, embodied, and collective practices of care. Activist practices have enabled the sidestepping of liberal democratic narratives of citizen participation, and permit subaltern subjects to politicize their own objectified position (Rocca 2021) in distinctly feminist ways. This sidestepping is exemplified by abortion companions working outside the healthcare system that, prior to legalization, grounded their work in the refusal to accept legal prescriptions over their bodies and personhood. Instead, they emphasized the praxis of accompanying abortions as “dictat[ing] [their] own law” (Belfiori 2015, 13). From its beginnings with Lesbians and Feminists for the Decriminalization of Abortion, Argentine abortion accompaniment has “[built] this demedicalized, self-managed, and empowering [abortion] discourse” (Mines et al. 2013, 134) in explicit rejection of capitalist heteropatriarchy. Before this backdrop, I employ feminist biopolitics from below to investigate the role of misoprostol in enabling affective attachments that shape counter-hegemonic subjectivities.

Contextualizing the Biopolitical Capacities of Misoprostol: Abortion, Subjectivity, and Normative Womanhood in Argentina

Argentina may seem like an unlikely choice for analyzing activism related to self-managed abortion, given the recent legalization of abortion. The new legislation establishes the right to voluntary termination (interrupción voluntaria del embarazo) until the fourteenth week, free of charge and in the public healthcare system without requiring justification. Beyond this, legal abortion (interrupción legal del embarazo) is permitted under the conditions previously governing all abortions: violation or a threat to the pregnant person’s health or life. Legalization was the result of decades-long feminist activism, with the National Campaign for the Right to Legal, Safe and Free Abortion (Campaña Nacional por el Derecho al Aborto Legal, Seguro y Gratuito) having been launched in 2005 (Bellucci 2014; Tarducci 2018). Under this umbrella, hundreds of groups came together to pursue the shared aim of legalization (Vacarezza 2023), while maintaining distinct strategies and objectives. The campaign includes a wide range of civil society organizations, among others professional associations, such as the Network of Health Professionals for the Right to Choose, as well as the abortion accompaniment network SenRed. The rise of Ni Una Menos in 2015 in response to the murder of fourteen-year-old Chiara Páez (Luengo 2018) marked a new massification of feminist activism. By 2018 abortion activism had grown into a mass movement known as the marea verde (Green Tide), and the National Campaign for the Right to Legal, Safe and Free Abortion had expanded into a “country-wide movement with alliances in numerous sectors of civil society” (Vacarezza 2023, 329).

In recent years, mainstream feminism has increasingly attended to marginalized experiences, including those of queer and Indigenous people. The renaming of the annual National Women’s Meeting illustrates this change; in 2019 the meeting was renamed the Plurinational Meeting of Women, Lesbians, Travestis, Trans, Intersexual, Bisexual and Non-Binary People (Caimmi 2021). Simultaneously, trans scholarship has called for more substantive inclusion, pointing out that many feminist movements have resisted “the consideration of trans people as subjects of abortion” (Radi and Elichiry, n.d., iv). This argument illustrates the continued importance of contesting gendered subjectivities implicated in abortion.

Self-managed abortion companions, most prominently Socorristas en Red (feministas y transfeministas que abortamos), constitute an important faction within Argentine feminisms (Burton 2017), which has been reconfiguring how the subject of abortion is understood. Their work continues to be crucial even after legalization. Founded by the La Revuelta collective in Neuquén in 2010, SenRed accompanies abortion seekers by providing information and supporting them throughout the abortion process (Zurbriggen et al. 2018). In 2024 forty-two collectives across the country are listed on SenRed’s website. According to the network’s 2022 statistics, 73 percent of abortion seekers learn about them by word of mouth, and 19.3 percent via social media or the internet (Socorristas en Red 2023). As indicated by their name, the network explicitly identifies as feminist and trans feminist. While SenRed accompanies abortion seekers from all parts of society, it is important to highlight that, even in illegal circumstances, higher class women can access safe abortions through private healthcare (De Zordo 2016). Abortion accompaniment thus primarily responds to the precarity of marginalized people’s abortion experiences.

Prior to legalization, SenRed’s activism normalized abortion “from the bottom up,” contributing to a wider process of social decriminalization as a key legalization strategy. This process describes abortion “[coming] out of the concealment in which it had been” to create broad social acceptance for its legal decriminalization (Tarducci 2018, 430). In this context, abortion companions devised new strategies through which abortion could be clandestine but safe. Self-managed abortion accompaniment practices emerged as a direct feminist “response to the failure of the state to provide safe abortion care” (Moseson et al. 2022, e106) and have been recognized as a way of bypassing “a state that does not recognize abortion rights” (McReynolds-Pérez 2017, 351). The (at least partial) decoupling of clandestinity and danger provided a crucial foundation for the affective attachments discussed below.

Following legalization, researchers affiliated with SenRed and the monitoring project Proyecto Mirar have raised concerns about persisting and newly arising obstacles to abortion access. These include regionally unequal access and diverse forms of obstetric violence, from the diffusion of false information, antiquated and unnecessarily cruel practices, to sexual abuse (Romero et al. 2021; Socorristas en Red 2022a, 2022b, 2022c). These ongoing issues illustrate the obstruction of reproductive autonomy not only by legal frameworks but also social norms, structural inequalities, and discriminatory health, political, and societal infrastructure. In practice, abortion can continue to be difficult to access. To come to grips with these persisting obstacles, an intersectional analysis of abortion access is indispensable, as it is particularly marginalized communities and those living outside population centers who struggle to access care.

Geography is a key determinant for access. Recent figures by Proyecto Mirar (n.d.-a) show that both abortion services offered and abortions realized in 2023 varied vastly by province. While on average, there are 0.17 services per 1,000 women of childbearing age across the country, there are only 0.03/1,000 in Chaco province as opposed to 0.48/1,000 in La Pampa (Proyecto Mirar, n.d.-a). To demonstrate the discrepancy between services offered and required, it merits reading Proyecto Mirar’s current statistics for the Northwest alongside those by SenRed for 2022 (Socorristas en Red 2023). Across the region, SenRed accompanied 2,870 people, constituting 21.6 percent of their accompaniments, second only to Buenos Aires province. Simultaneously, three of six Northwestern provinces rank in the lowest quartile for abortion services (Proyecto Mirar, n.d.-a).

Abortion access is experienced unevenly, with barriers disproportionately affecting “marginalizes people, especially…those with low incomes, racialized [and] neurodivergent people, migrants without Argentine document” (Radi and Elichiry n.d., 18). The feminist movement has long attended to socioeconomic inequality as a decisive factor determining abortion care, with free access being a key demand reflected in the National Campaign’s slogan “legal, safe and free” (Sutton and Vacarezza 2021). Indigenous communities frequently face particular barriers to abortion access. Responding to these barriers, Catholics for the Right to Choose has collaborated with Indigenous, Afro-descendent, and campesina women and gender-nonconforming people in ten provinces since 2019 to adapt sexual and reproductive health guidelines (Cuerpos y Libertades, n.d.-b). Cuerpos y Libertades’ aim is to promote the exercise of reproductive autonomy by adapting abortion guidelines into Indigenous languages (Cuerpos y Libertades, n.d.-b), highlighting, for instance, the need for “intercultural interpreters and health workers, principally speakers of our language Qom” (Cuerpos y Libertades 2022, 6) in their Qom adaptation. Further, reproductive events having “historically been gendered as cis women’s problems” (Radi and Elichiry, n.d., 1) obstructs abortion access for trans and gender-nonconforming people, as healthcare providers frequently fail to “[take] into account different contingent factors in [abortion care]” (19) for this demographic. This observation emphasizes the urgency of reconfiguring aborting subjects beyond cisheteronormativity.

The wide range of people obstructed from exercising their reproductive autonomy is reflected in the numbers that continued to prefer self-management over abortion in the healthcare system in 2021. SenRed have stated that of 9,900 people they supported that year, only 24 percent opted for the latter, while 76 percent chose self-management (Socorristas en Red 2021a). These statistics illustrate that the key objective of feminist abortion companions—enabling access to abortion for those excluded from it due to geographical and institutional barriers, obstetric violence, and multiple forms of discrimination—remains crucial. It also emphasizes the importance of attending to underlying contestations over bodies that can gestate and their agency as determining factors in abortion politics, making attending to misoprostol as an emancipatory biopolitical tool all the more urgent.

Activist practices of reclaiming reproductive agency by removing abortion from medical gatekeeping ought to be seen in the context of wider contestations over who is an agentic subject. Historically, Argentine women’s political subjectivity has been bound up in heteronormative maternalist discourses, with their bodies functioning as “the site for the literal creation of the nation” (Kerr 2020, 10) in the nineteenth century. Despite Argentina’s “prevailing ‘white’ image today, around a third of Buenos Aires’ population was Afro-Argentine in 1800,” and until the second half of the nineteenth century, over half of its territory was governed Indigenously (Taylor 2021, 355). Blanqueamiento (whitening) emerged as a strategic process accompanying Black and Indigenous people’s “elimination and erasure” (Taylor 2021, 346; Briones 2002; Kerr 2020). Through blanqueamiento, political and religious authorities promoted “European immigration and miscegenation” (Edwards 2020, 5) and shaped whiteness through shifting definitions and demographic categories (Edwards 2020; Kerr 2020). Both Indigenous and Afro-descendent women were deemed “apt to be civilized” (Kerr 2020, 156) and taught “morality, virtue, and civility, characteristics that epitomized whiteness” (Edwards 2020, 7) so they would educate “their offspring to be productive future citizens” (Kerr 2020, 19) in an increasingly white nation. Simultaneously, their reproductive freedoms were violently curtailed, for instance through the systematic separation of Indigenous families (Kerr 2020), and this very —scientific, societal, and bureaucratic—whitening process worked to erase them from female citizenship.

In the early twentieth century, a “socialization of maternity towards eugenic goals” (Stepan 1992, 753) linked national duty, motherhood, and compliance with heteronormative gender roles through health scientific and cultural discourses. Preoccupations with reproduction and motherhood, as well as degeneration and sexual deviance in relation to poor and racialized immigrants within eugenic politics, led, for instance, to the “confinement of criminals, prostitutes, and degenerates, removing them from the pool of sexual partners" (Kerr 2020, 161). The mother, entrusted with caring for family and (by extension) nation, was considered the “guarantor of socialization, schooling, integration into work and normative precepts of morality and hygiene” (Rossi 2006, 98). This notion aligns with Argentine eugenics’ general focus “on education and public sanitation as a means of improving the stock of the nation” (Smith 2016, 1044). In consequence of this history, Argentine feminists such as Verónica Gago have emphasized that the individual as the base unit of the nation-state is “shaped through [the] dispossession” (2020, 51) of Indigenous land and feminized bodies. It is precisely the strategic conflation of womanhood with racialized motherhood as a tool for biopolitical control that makes abortion a relevant experience to analyze regarding its potential for disrupting such heteronormative subjecthood.

This politicization of women as mothers has been a double-edged sword for women activists. On the one hand, it has been a potent source for intervention in public discourse, especially in the case of the Madres de Plaza de Mayo. One of Argentina’s most prominent human rights organizations, they originally were “ordinary housewives who began protesting [against the military dictatorship], demanding answers from the state about their disappeared children” (Smith 2016, 1044). Their activism affirms the “figure of the heroic mother” (Morgan 2015, 140), reinforcing the hegemonic associations of women’s subjectivity with motherhood. In post-dictatorship Argentina, they are a highly respected and impactful civil society organization, with their legitimacy being in part grounded in the “perception of women as mothers who would protect their children” (140). As such, human rights became interwoven with motherhood, which “discursively excludes abortion from the realm of human rights” (140). In resistance to the dictatorship’s “state terrorism, forced disappearances and torture” (Jones et al. 2018, 86), the right to life, a rhetoric that has also been instrumentalized by anti-abortion movements, took on particular discursive weight.

On the other hand, the Madres have significant authority to weigh in on sociopolitical issues, as they did in favor of abortion legalization. Abortion activists have taken the Madres as “moral and political reference” (Sutton and Vacarezza 2020, 740) and placed “‘human rights’ at the center of their legislative project, reiterating that abortion is a ‘debt to democracy’” (Morgan 2015, 143). They have highlighted that, against the backdrop of Argentina’s authoritarian past, the democratic state must “not only to refrain from illegitimate violence but should also recognize, enable, and guarantee women’s human rights, broadly defined” (Sutton and Borland 2019, 37). In a context where, as previously discussed, healthcare institutions are often sites of obstetric violence and reproductive control, misoprostol has been a tool for activists to not only demand reproductive autonomy as a right but also enact it as such. When used in self-managed and feminist-accompanied abortion, misoprostol constitutes a technology for withdrawing from the heteronormative mandate of both state and family. As one of Belfiori’s narrators states, a body that aborts is “a body denied to compulsive maternity” (2015, 74). As pregnant people choose to abort with pharmaceutical knowledge otherwise gatekept by medical professionals and the accompaniment of activists, outside the hospital or consultation room, they, at least momentarily, position themselves as autonomous from these institutions. As such, misoprostol emerges as a technology for feminist biopolitics from below.

Challenging Exclusionary Subjectivities, Making Feminist Selves: Misoprostol, Activist Practices, and Affect

Having discussed the wider historical context in which misoprostol acquires meaning as a biopolitical technology, I now address how it does so by focusing specifically on the affective attachments pertaining to notions of solidarity, expertise, and joy. To this end, it is necessary to discuss how misoprostol’s widespread availability has altered the scope of feminist abortion activism. I focus on the use of misoprostol alone, as combined regimes using mifepristone have only recently become widely available in Argentina. Misoprostol was officially available on prescription only before legalization, but “it was fairly easy to buy a formulation containing…misoprostol[,]…authorized for rheumatoid arthritis in retail pharmacies” (Vacarezza 2023, 341). Pharmaceutical technologies, like misoprostol, have enabled “routes of access to safe methods, without necessarily needing legislative change” (Cornwall et al. 2008, 7). The pharmaceutical has formed the basis for new kinds of feminist abortion activism. Socorristas en Red, for instance, has developed a distinct accompaniment protocol consisting of initial contact via a hotline, followed by a group meeting with activists where abortion seekers receive detailed information about the use of misoprostol in abortion (Zurbriggen et al. 2018). During the abortion itself, they are accompanied by an activist via telephone, or—in particular cases such as second trimester abortions—in person (Zurbriggen et al. 2018). This practice is underpinned by feminist principles, including judgment-free and compassionate care (Zurbriggen et al. 2018). Accompaniment groups’ hotlines typically “widely publicized [their] phone numbers” (McReynolds-Pérez 2017, 351), and knowledge about pharmaceutical abortion is spread widely via personal networks, the internet, as well as activists’ presence at feminist marches (Belfiori 2015; Socorristas en Red 2023).

Misoprostol has also served as a technology for creating new ways of relating to abortion, one’s body, and the wider feminist community. Safety is a crucial baseline for thinking about abortion in terms other than maternal mortality, desperation, and suffering. Across Latin America, hotlines providing medical information about pharmaceutical abortion have significantly increased safe abortion access and improved healthcare (Drovetta 2015). A recent study found that self-managed abortion accompanied by Argentine feminist groups is “non-inferior to the effectiveness of clinician-managed medication abortion administered in a clinical setting” (Moseson et al. 2022, e111). Simultaneously, these forms of activism generate “knowledges that politicize situations and events of the ‘private sphere’ …[grounded in] women’s concrete and quotidian experiences” (Burton 2017, 109). When sharing information about pharmaceutical abortion via phone lines or in workshops, activists link technical knowledge about misoprostol—How many pills have to be taken? How frequently? How do I know if expulsion has occurred?—to political knowledge about bodily autonomy and reproductive rights.

One abortion seeker recounts in her testimony that an activist “explained the procedure to me and that I had to wait a few days for a Socorrista to get in contact with me…It was a terrible relief when she told me that she could help me and that we’d resolve it” (Socorristas en Red 2020a, 10). Technical knowledge about misoprostol generates emotions like relief because it enables abortion seekers to reject a pregnancy and motherhood previously perceived as inescapable. This knowledge challenges the understanding of pregnant people’s subjectivity in the heteronormative terms of previously discussed mandated motherhood. Misoprostol’s properties as a pharmaceutical—being relatively easy to administer and comparatively affordable, thus making an otherwise life-threatening procedure safe when accompanied by feminist activists (Moseson et al. 2022)—have been harnessed by activists as the foundations for shaping alternative subjectivities. Affective and embodied activist practices are crucial to bridging the gap between commanding pharmaceutical knowledge for medically safe abortion and the construction of these subjectivities. In the following section, I unpack how by discussing three case studies: expertise, solidarity, and joy.

Expertise, Solidarity, and Joy: Case Studies of Feminist Biopolitics from Below

A stated aim of SenRed is to “displace certain [harmful] imaginaries about abortion” (Belfiori 2015, 13), as Dahiana Belfiori, author of Código Rosa and herself Socorrista, writes. Activists seek to displace negative affective attachments (Ahmed 2004) of shame, guilt, and secrecy by invoking alternative associations in discourse and practice made possible through the appropriation and sharing of pharmaceutical knowledge. As affect theorists such as Sara Ahmed (2004) and Mariela Solana and Nayla Luz Vacarezza (2020) have highlighted, emotionality is constituent of all gendered identities. Ahmed (2004) conceptualizes emotions as shaping both individual and collective identities in encounters between subjects. Argentine feminists have deliberately utilized a broad affective repertoire for political resistance and social transformation, especially regarding abortion (Macón 2021; Solana and Vacarezza 2020; Vacarezza 2018). In testimonies such as Estamos Cerca, storytelling about abortion expresses “an affective repertoire in which diverse [at times contradictory and complex] ways of feeling coexist” (Vacarezza and Burton 2023, 14). Introducing Archivo Rosa, SenRed emphasizes that their activism materializes their desire to “build ties of sorority” (Socorristas en Red n.d.-a), thus centering the affective attachments implicated in their activism. In a commentary published as part of Código Rosa, Vacarezza underlines that in the web of activists, abortion seekers, and technologies, “different and potentially transformative forms of knowing about abortion and new forms of…feeling it are created” (2015, 139). These new feelings enable feminist activists to rethink subjectivity as affective, embodied, and relational through abortion itself “as a feat of disobedience in the face of the compulsive mandate of maternity” (Bellucci 2014, 24).

To explore the role of affect in misoprostol’s functioning as a biopolitical technology, the following section analyzes expertise, solidarity, and joy in abortion accompaniment. I focus on these examples because they directly oppose some of the affective mechanisms used to enforce normative—heterosexual, cisgender, racialized—subjectivities. Expertise is included because it carries significant affective charge in the context of feminist abortion accompaniment. Activists have used “expertise about pharmaceutical abortion…to position themselves as lay experts on safe abortion” (McReynolds-Pérez 2017, 371). This lay expertise challenges the “biomedical organization as a hierarchical and patriarchal structure” (Drovetta 2015, 53), making expertise an important facet of feminist mobilizing. Given the emancipatory character of feminists’ appropriation of expertise, and its oppositional relationship to patriarchal healthcare institutions, it has embodied and emotional dimensions closely connected to sentiments of self-assuredness, safety, and agency. Like solidarity and joy, it functions as an affective mechanism that constructs a collective oppositional body of feminist activism and challenges notions of shame, condescension, and silence attributed to abortion. Solidarity counters the isolation and loneliness brought about by dominant portrayals of abortion as diverging from societal norm, shame-inducing, and an experience that ought to be kept behind closed doors. Lastly, joy sits in opposition to a sentiment commonly attributed to abortion even among some of those supportive of it: a sense of fear and gravity that presupposes abortion as an experience one always ought to struggle with. Joy has featured prominently in abortion activism, especially in visual representations and in the experiences of abortion companions, aiming to subvert dominant affective paradigms (Kimport et al. 2023; Sutton and Vacarezza 2020). This section is divided into three parts, addressing, in turn, the affectivity of expertise, solidarity, and joy.

Expertise and resistance to obstetric violence

Abortion companions’ harnessing of technical expertise on pharmaceutical abortion from international feminist organizations, World Health Organization guidance, and observational data gathered through their own practice is significant in affective terms. By pairing “new technologies with direct-action strategies” (McReynolds-Pérez 2017, 351), activists generate holistic abortion practices and dispute who counts as experts. Similarly, Radi and Elichiry emphasize “members of organizations that facilitate abortions and trans people who have experienced abortion” (n.d., iv) as specialists contributing to their manual, shifting their position from object to subject of inquiry. To turn abortion seekers into experts of their own abortion, activists provide them with the information necessary for using misoprostol correctly and determining the success of an abortion. In Estamos Cerca, one abortion seeker recounts that she “examined everything that had come out of me. Everything. I sent photos [to her abortion companion]” (Socorristas en Red 2020a, 7). Thus, she was able to undertake a medical procedure otherwise requiring medical scrutiny.

Various types of political knowledge are implicated in these practices of acquiring and sharing information about pharmaceutical abortion. First, knowledge about the safe use of misoprostol in the hands of feminist activists is in itself political because it challenges hegemonic distinctions between scientific expert and lay people (McReynolds-Pérez 2017). A story collected in Código Rosa recounts, “I am surprised by the relaxed atmosphere. These women are there so that another two women give them information about abortion with misoprostol. These women trust that information. I cannot stop comparing my experience from twenty years ago: the secrecy, the fear, the desperation. I encountered none of that in this circle of knowledges and affects” (Belfiori 2015, 91). This fictionalized experience of feminist-accompanied abortion illustrates how pharmaceutical expertise becomes a means for resisting power structures within medical and social institutions by disrupting negative affects such as secrecy, fear, and desperation. Similarly, an abortion seeker featured in Estamos Cerca states, “I knew every symptom, so I was…prepared” (Socorristas en Red 2020b, 9).

Furthermore, technical expertise about misoprostol enables subjectivities contrary to hegemonic notions of womanhood as they reject mandatory maternity. Through sharing abortion knowledge, activists facilitate the reclaiming of medical agency. While most abortion companions are not formally medically trained, they “undergo extensive training in feminist principles and medical guidelines” (Zurbriggen et al. 2018, 109). Information shared includes details on patient rights, the conditions for voluntary and legal pregnancy termination, and different abortion methods. This knowledge becomes a tool for confronting medical institutions that withhold such information and obstruct access to adequate abortion care, thus limiting reproductive autonomy and reinforcing hegemonic womanhood. As SenRed activists highlight in Archivo Rosa, abortion seekers have frequently experienced “[a] medic who conned or mistreated them [and] pharmacies that refused to sell them the medication even with prescription” (Peralta and Fonseca 2015). Feminist activists observe that negative encounters with healthcare professionals continue to occur after legalisation (Socorristas en Red 2022a; 2022b; 2022c; 2022d). Similarly, a story featured in Código Rosa explores the violence implicated in the upholding of mandated motherhood through inappropriate ultrasound use: “I didn’t want to hear its heartbeats…and the [healthcare worker] smiling, content,…as if he took pleasure in having gotten me to listen to my baby’s heartbeat” (Belfiori 2015, 31).

Activists continue to report the use of ultrasound to force pregnant people to view the image and listen to heartbeats as an “anti-abortion instrument” intended to dissuade them from aborting (Socorristas en Red 2022d), as well as other forms of obstetric violence, even after legalization. Appropriating technical knowledge about misoprostol via feminist abortion companions enables abortion seekers to either sidestep the healthcare system entirely through self-management or to be in a stronger position to confront it. With information and accompaniment offered by feminist activists equipping abortion seekers to “put on an imaginary bullet-proof vest to receive all those shots, hear those prejudices from the nurses and medics” (Socorristas en Red 2020b, 8), accompaniment practices alter the affective experience of abortion.

In their 2019 statistics, SenRed emphasizes that “the state abandons those who abort whilst we do not” (2020f, 35). With medical and state institutions commonly being stigmatizing and obstructing factors in abortion care (Radi and Elichiry, n.d.), abortion seekers frequently relate to them negatively. One Estamos Cerca testimony states that sometimes “we have to lie when we go to the hospital, if it gets complicated, because … they judge us and we don’t want that. So, the fear is constant. And that’s where the companions…fulfil the most important role, to listen to you and cast away your doubts” (Socorristas en Red 2020a, 7). This statement clearly illustrates the affective working of expertise. Medical institutions function as sites of reproductive control via the negative emotions they instill and uphold around abortion, in this case fear. Through the technical expertise shared by SenRed, this fear is eased, thus enabling other affective attachments to emerge. Beyond the command of knowledge about misoprostol, expertise here also encompasses an emotional state of certainty, reliability, and independence from patriarchal institutions. Another testimony from Estamos Cerca captures this sentiment: “Thousands of questions that [the activist] answered with a love and dedication that, I swear, I felt like I was talking to the older sister I don’t have. She contained us, she accompanied us, she was psychologist, doctor and friend all the time” (Socorristas en Red 2020d, 4). As such, feminist expertise enables abortion seekers to reaffirm themselves as autonomous subjects through self-managed abortion as a collective affective practice.

Solidarity and alternative networks of care

Solidarity is crucial for the formation of affective networks that accompany abortions and offer alternatives to such institutions. It challenges the relegation of reproduction to private, depoliticized realms of the home, and constructs support systems beyond the nuclear family. As such, abortion accompaniment is an instance of recentering the pregnant person as the protagonist within obstetric procedures that otherwise often protagonize others. As Rosalind P. Petchesky argues, obstetric practice views “the fetus as ‘patient,’ separate and autonomous from the pregnant woman” (1987, 271). In Argentina, the figure of the fetus as the “unborn child” has been deliberately constructed as a mechanism of biopolitical control (Flores 2011). As such, reproductive events emerge as passive experiences (Baird 2001), happening to someone without the agency to make autonomous decisions about them.

Opposing this lack of agency, activists create support networks that step in where state and family fall short, as activist slogans such as “to abort, we have each other” (Socorristas en Red 2020f, 1) manifest. One person describes experiencing these networks in their Estamos Cerca testimony as a “great accompaniment, warmth and a beautiful sense of companionship in the face of so much sadness and anguish” (Socorristas en Red 2020c, 4). The notion of affective solidarity, which names affects as a way of connection without being rooted “in identity or other group characteristics” (Hemmings 2012, 148), is useful for conceptualizing a crucial hinge between the pharmaceutical and epistemic working of misoprostol. The safe use of misoprostol enables activists to pair their commitment to “take care of the life and health of those who decide to [abort]” (Socorristas en Red 2020f, 5), as highlighted in SenRed’s introduction to their 2019 statistics and reflected in the production of guidebooks and instructive websites, with a vision of providing “caring, loving, and affected accompaniments” (Socorristas en Red n.d.-b).

By sharing knowledge about misoprostol and accompanying the process of pharmaceutical abortion, activists invoke a deeply political solidarity with abortion seekers from diverse parts of society, without requiring it being grounded in shared political identity. One abortion seeker expresses the connection felt to other people who have aborted by stating in her testimony that “my uterus hurts expressing a historical, collective pain” (Socorristas en Red 2020b, 10). Another testimony given by an abortion seeker about their experience during quarantine illustrates a similar sentiment toward the activist who accompanied her: “we did not know each other,…but…we confided in each other” (Socorristas en Red 2020a, 6). As such, misoprostol enables activists to engage in practices of solidarity with pregnant people cutting across all spheres of society, but especially among marginalized communities, and provide care for each other where the state falls short.

One abortion seeker highlights the importance of this kind of solidarity when emphasizing in her testimony that “empathy crosses borders, crosses prejudices, crosses class, crosses machismo, crosses adversities” (Socorristas en Red 2020c, 11). Through practicing solidarity, activists challenge the association of autonomy with notions that “people can exist or act in complete independence of others” (Cornwall et al. 2008, 3). In her contribution to Archivo Rosa, a SenRed activist states, “we are learning that socorrismo is a new politics of affects. We learn that we have new feelings that expand us. That we are affected by these women who abort, by each other, and by ourselves in a new way. We learn to look at life in connection, or we desire that it begins to be constructed as such” (Grosso 2017). As such, activists put forth a vision for reproductive autonomy as affective and “inherently relational” (Cornwall et al. 2008, 3).

Abortion joy and counter-hegemonic subjectivities

Lastly, joy is another key emotion enabled by the activist production and sharing of knowledge about misoprostol. With abortion continuing to be a primary cause of maternal death in Latin America (Zamberlin et al. 2012) and Argentina prior to legalization (Radi and Elichiry, n.d.), the real risk entailed in abortion outside clinical settings has long underpinned the biopolitical control of reproductive bodies, with fear functioning as a disciplining mechanism. Making abortion safe outside the healthcare system has therefore been crucial for breaking the potent nexus of stigmatization and obstetric violences that relegates abortion to the margins of society. Feminist activists have made abortion significantly more safely and reliably available even prior to legalization, with research finding that “self-managed medication abortion with accompaniment support is safe” (Moseson et al. 2022, e111). Thus, they have created the foundations for thinking about abortion in terms other than precarity, which in turn allows them to contradict the fear and risk associated with abortion—particularly for marginalized people—and resignify its meaning for activist communities and abortion seekers alike.

Since Ni Una Menos, Argentine feminisms have stipulated access to legal, safe, and free abortion as crucial for protecting both “our lives and dreams” (Ni Una Menos 2018, 93), as highlighted in their 2018 collection of manifestos. The latter emphasizes that activist projects regarding abortion reach beyond more medicalized arguments for abortion access focused on avoiding maternal death. Rather, Ni Una Menos emphasizes the need to imagine new worlds “according to a feminist ethics of life, not of sacrifice, [but] of pleasure and desire” (2018, 4). Emotional responses such as pleasure, joy, and desire to abortion have been made possible through feminist activist accompaniment practices (Kimport et al. 2023). As one person sharing her testimony in Estamos Cerca describes, “I remember them [the two activists who accompanied her] and I cry tears of joy, because thanks to the two wonderful people I met, I fulfilled my decision and I’m proud of the decision I took” (Socorristas en Red 2020c, 15). Her statement underscores how feminist activist practices made possible through technical expertise about misoprostol and practices of solidarity outlined above enabled her feelings of joy and pride.

This attachment of life-affirming and joyful sentiments to abortion is also visually represented through the color pink (Sutton and Vacarezza 2020), which is ubiquitous on SenRed’s website and social media presence. According to Belfiori, pink is chosen because it is “strong, intense, full of life and passion” (2015, 17), visually contradicting more established associations of abortion with suffering, death, and despair. As such, it positions feminist abortion accompaniment as fundamentally and explicitly life-affirming, opposing the attempt of anti-abortion movements to position themselves as “pro-life.” In Estamos Cerca, various narrators recount the happiness and relief after their abortion, as exemplified by statements such as, “I knew that at some point the embryo would come out and it did. That was it, everything had already happened, I felt tranquil. I couldn't be happier, because it sounds a little rough, but I was happy” (Socorristas en Red 2020b, 8). Statements such as this one draw attention to the embodied nature of selfhood, which comes particularly to the fore in the context of the physical experience of choosing not to remain pregnant.

In conjunction with providing pregnant people with solidarity networks and the expertise to confront medical authorities, a “discourse of celebratory abortion” (McReynolds-Pérez 2014, 157) provides a sense of agency over their own body otherwise denied. Within conventional perceptions of abortion as “always already…something ‘wrong’” (Sutton and Vacarezza 2020, 734), celebratory discourses introduce pleasure as a valid priority into the debate. In one of Belfiori’s stories, the narrator recounts that she wanted to abort because she wanted to “enjoy [her partner], the house, the poplars, [her daughter] chasing the chicken” (2015, 24). Her narrative rejects dominant social conceptions of abortion as necessarily associated with desperation, trauma, and difficulty, instead emphasizing it as a life-affirming decision. This experience only becomes possible because of the availability of safe, self-managed abortion with misoprostol, outside of familial and medical institutions, which disconnects abortion from previously intrinsic threats to the abortion seeker’s health and life.

Together, expertise, solidarity, and joy attached to and made possible by misoprostol function as affective mechanisms that enable a feminist biopolitics from below. Misoprostol materially alters pregnant people’s subject positions. Through feminists’ affective practices built around the use of misoprostol, pregnant people are able to abort without requiring the support of their family or a doctor, allowing them to withdraw from heteronormative mandates of motherhood. Various abortion seekers participating in Estamos Cerca refer to this rejection in liberatory terms, frequently when closing their testimony. One person states that “I confirm that motherhood must be desired, or it must not be” (Socorristas en Red 2020d, 13), while another says “my uterus gestates the poetry of freedom” (Socorristas en Red 2020b, 10). The cause for this freedom is clearly located in having been able to obtain a feminist-accompanied abortion, with another testimony stating, “my path rewrites itself and you gave me the pen and the paper” (Socorristas en Red 2020e, 11). Misoprostol thus becomes a vehicle for emotions that contradict feelings conventionally associated with abortion, especially when self-managed. The embodied process of expelling an unwanted pregnancy also becomes one of expelling “generations of imposed mandates that end our lives and dreams” (Socorristas en Red 2020b, 10). Activists engage in practices and discourses that establish the counter-hegemonic subject as embodied, affective, and relational, pitted directly against gendered and racialized normative expectations. As they confront “the limits of contemporary neoliberal states” (Sotiris 2020, 28), shifting affective paradigms around abortion constitutes a distinctly feminist practice of biopolitics from below. In doing so, a more nuanced, multifaceted subjecthood for those to whom it is foreclosed by established definitions of political subjectivity is made possible.

Conclusion

This article has interrogated the role of misoprostol in self-managed, feminist-accompanied abortion as a biopolitical technology. I have shown how, through affective attachments of expertise, solidarity, and joy to pharmaceutical abortion, activists are able to displace one-dimensional negative affective paradigms. I have proposed feminist biopolitics from below as a useful conceptual tool for grappling with the counter-hegemonic subjectivities enabled by this process.

Abortion as a political experience is situated within the histories of normative womanhood in Argentina, as are feminist activist practices that have brought about access and legalization. These histories, as well as contemporary configurations of womanhood are inextricably intertwined with concerns about motherhood, whiteness, and national identity, leading Gago (2020) to highlight dispossession of Indigenous land and feminized bodies as underpinning definitions of the individual. At the same time, motherhood has been a potent framework for feminist mobilization, reconfiguring it as a source of collective action, as activists building on the Madres’ legacy to frame abortion as a debt to democracy and human rights have illustrated (Sutton and Vacarezza 2020).

Abortion constitutes an instance in which normative expectations about women’s subjectivities are enforced, often through affective mechanisms of shame and stigma and most rigidly upon those who are most marginalized. Misoprostol-related activist practices have to be understood within a context in which feminist activists have been disputing hegemonic definitions of subjectivity and political identity especially as they pertain to the experiences of queer, Black, and Indigenous Argentinians, in relation to abortion and generally. In the second half of the article, I took a closer look at misoprostol and its role in feminist abortion accompaniment. Focusing on feelings of solidarity, expertise, and joy, I traced how misoprostol and the production of related technical and political knowledge become a vehicle for subversive affective attachments, which enable people who abort to feel differently about their experience and about themselves. Entailing the possibility of having a safe abortion beyond institutional control, misoprostol functions as a technology for a “new politics of affects” (Grosso 2017), as feminist activists have called it. These practices make for a distinctly feminist form of collective militancy that sidesteps liberal democratic modes of participation, as explored by Sotiris (2020) and Rocca (2021), engendering a feminist biopolitics from below.

The affective practices made possible through misoprostol as a pharmaceutical and biopolitical technology throw into relief the necessity to understand abortion as not only an obstetric but also political event in which counter-hegemonic subjectivities are produced. As we witness increasing restrictions of reproductive freedom in the US and elsewhere, attending to misoprostol in self-managed abortion activism, its affective attachments, and its role as a technology for making feminist biopolitics from below may offer insightful perspectives on abortion and reproductive freedom in Argentina, Latin America, and beyond.

Acknowledgements

I am grateful for the generous support and feedback I received from my supervisors Dominique Béhague and Anne Pollock, the 2022 4S/ESOCITE early-career writing workshop, and the anonymous reviewer.

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