Abstract
Magic Misoprostol is a valuable contribution to the growing literature on feminist organizing for self-managed medication abortion (SMA) in Latin America and around the world. There are numerous studies that examine the safety and efficacy of medication abortion with attention to activists’ support and education for people facing an undesired pregnancy (e.g. Braine 2023; McReynolds-Perez et al. 2023; Moseson et al. 2020). Magic Misoprostol brings the medication itself into a more prominent location in the story of feminist organizing.
In much of the literature on the work of SMA activists, abortion medication plays somewhat of a background role in the story, a necessary precondition or “without which” but not an active character in the narrative. This results at least in part from legal questions as the movement of medication can inhabit more ambiguous areas of the law than other aspects of activism for SMA. Cordelia Freeman successfully threads the needle of the legal concerns to tell an integrated story of activism and the medication that makes it possible without increasing the potential risks to activists.
Freeman locates the medication socially and historically in relation to the activism that has in many ways emerged around it to write a study of feminist organizing that engages with the profound interconnection between action and medication in Latin America. The book explores how the medication transforms possibilities for action while the activists, in turn, transform the medication itself. Power emerges through the intersection of medication and political organizing, not one or the other. The medication enables new pathways to the liberation of abortion through the ability to safely end a pregnancy outside the medical system with a handful of pills, a single sheet of instructions, and support from friends, family, and/or feminist activists.
The book is theoretically interesting and somewhat frustrating simultaneously. Freeman touches on both science and technology studies and social movement literatures but does not engage as deeply as the data would have allowed, especially in relation to social movements. While the interaction of activism and medication constitutes the underlying theme, in practice, the in-depth exploration of the work and experience of activists takes center stage, and the medication weaves through intermittently with variable levels of attention to the ways movement and medication are mutually constitutive. The activism itself comes to life on the page with ethnographic vitality, but at times with less connection to larger historical and social movement contexts than this reader hoped for. This does have the benefit of expanding accessibility; the powerful narrative opens it up to undergraduate students while also providing rich empirical material that graduate students can engage with in multiple ways, including thinking about theoretical linkages with other research works.
The title invokes reproductive justice, and both the Introduction and Conclusion engage with this expanded perspective that locates reproduction within larger human rights and social justice frameworks. However, the emphasis on the “magic” of Misoprostol in the hands of feminists has the unintended consequence of separating abortion from the larger domain of reproductive justice. The ability of SMA with activist support to liberate abortion from medical control, combined with strategies that functionally separate support for SMA from other forms of community-based reproductive support, has enabled a movement that does not always engage with other domains of reproductive (in)justice. This tendency varies transnationally, with both the hotlines of sub-Saharan Africa and full spectrum doulas in the U.S. integrating SMA into a broader reproductive focus (Braine 2023), more so than for activists in Latin America.
Magic Misoprostol provides a deep ethnographic engagement with feminist organizing for self-managed abortion in parts of Latin America, and also with the ways activism and medication interact to place abortion fully in the hands of people facing an unwanted pregnancy. This book will be of interest to scholars of reproductive justice, feminist movements, and community health activism.