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Barriers to abortion facing Mexican immigrants in North Carolina: Choosing folk healers versus standard medical options

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Abstract

Abortion is among the most stigmatized reproductive health issues faced by women in the United States. Using the reproductive justice framework, we discuss the numerous obstacles Mexican immigrant women and teens living in North Carolina face in seeking abortions and the ways in which the barriers experienced by these women are the product of intersecting forms of oppression based on race, gender, sexuality, class, ability, age, immigration status and linguistic abilities, among others. These struggles are depicted through ethnographic data as well as interviews with midwives, program directors, folk healers (curanderas/os) and Mexican immigrant women and girls making decisions about abortion. Their experiences are analyzed to highlight that Mexican immigrant women and teens are restricted by legal and medical institutions. The findings focus on how these women ultimately receive abortion services in the face of structural barriers to formal care and why women often seek abortion care outside of the formal health-care sector.

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Notes

  1. In the United States, recent patterns of migration from Latin American countries to cities, rural areas, small towns and developing suburbs in states such as Georgia, North and South Carolina, and Virginia (Pew Hispanic Center, 2005; Smith and Furuseth, 2006) have given rise to shifts in cultural understandings of community belonging. The result has been a new South emerging from the old – a multicultural, transnational dominion in what was once the United States’ pre-eminently bi-racial landscape (Drever, 2006, 19).

  2. For the purposes of this article, “Latina” refers to any woman born in Latin America or of Latin American origin.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. University of California at Davis,

    Natalia Deeb-Sossa

  2. University of South Carolina, Columbia

    Deborah L Billings

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  1. Natalia Deeb-Sossa
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Deeb-Sossa, N., Billings, D. Barriers to abortion facing Mexican immigrants in North Carolina: Choosing folk healers versus standard medical options. Lat Stud 12, 399–423 (2014). https://doi.org/10.1057/lst.2014.44

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