Lawful Sins examines the provisioning of and social attitudes toward legal abortion (interrupción legal del embarazo in Spanish, or ILE) in Mexico City after a 2007 reform decriminalized the procedure in the capital up to 12 weeks in pregnancy. Through ethnographic interviews and informal conversations at two ILE clinics carried out approximately seven years after the reform's passage, Singer explores patients' and clinicians' perspectives toward abortion and other reproductive phenomena, as well as the “dynamics of care” in the clinics, which the author argues “were central to the instantiation of abortion rights there” (p. 27). Singer also examines a few organizations providing abortion care to women in other regions of Mexico, either by facilitating women's travel to the capital or by assisting them in managing medical abortions at home.
Lawful Sins forms part of a growing body of literature that highlights the failure of rights-based frameworks to resolve several...
