The discursive threads around the criminalization of the crime of abortion in the second half of the nineteenth century in the District of Morelia

Abstract

The criminalization of abortion in Mexico by the State underwent a process of readjustments that largely responded to a key moment of secularization, in which transformations were made in the criminal courts of the second half of the nineteenth century. At first, in practice, an attempt was made to differentiate abortion from infanticide. Later, in the transition to legal positivism, the prototype of intentional abortion and the punishment that this crime merited was built in the legal bodies; its construction was cultural, as it usually is with any transgression. In the case of Michoacán, this entire journey can be reconstructed by detecting a set of discursive entanglements, generated by various enunciators in criminal courts.