Abstract
Abortion has defined relations between women and girls and the Chilean State for the past 146 years. During the late 19th and first half of the 20th century, the State's modernizing policies and laws increasingly regulated the lives and bodies of women and girls, laying the foundation for decades of institutionalized gender violence. The criminalization of abortion practices and its legal prosecution is a paradigmatic example of the gendered normativity of the State.
This study presents a feminist socio-historical inquiry into the interlocking mechanisms of the Chilean legal system and the medical instiitution in disciplining women's bodies and reproductive practices. I analyze gender-based state-sanctioned violence in the context of the criminal investigation and prosecution of abortion between 1874 and 1950. Based on case files of criminal abortion from the Archivo Nacional Histórico de Santiago, I discuss prosecutorial practices driven by the legal imperatives of evidence production and imposed on "non-white" working-class women.