Written by Anna Theresa Schmid
What image comes to mind when you hear the word “abortion”? Maybe it’s a woman staring at a positive pregnancy test, devastated. Or someone walking through protestors toward a clinic, face hidden from cameras. Maybe a sterile doctor’s office – fluorescent lights, silence. All of these images have a common thread: it’s a bleak situation, where the person at the centre is utterly alone.
Moving away from individualistic understandings of abortion
Particularly in Western societies, we tend to understand abortion as a private issue and rarely think about it as a shared experience. The dominant view of healthcare, and abortion in particular, is a deeply individualised one, focused on personal responsibility and medical authority. Across other parts of the world, though, and especially in Latin America, communal practices of abortion care have a long tradition, recently also becoming more present in research. For example, feminist groups in the region have shown how abortion accompaniment enables self-managed abortion in restrictive settings, transforming abortion care to be rooted in empathy and solidarity (Belfrage, 2024; Larrea & Veldhuis, 2025).
Continue reading