Experience obtaining legal abortion in Uruguay: knowledge, attitudes, and stigma among abortion clients.

BACKGROUND: The abortion law in Uruguay changed in 2012 to allow first trimester abortion on request. Implementation of the law in Uruguay has been lauded, but barriers to care, including abortion stigma, remain. This study aimed to assess women's experiences seeking abortion services and related attitudes and knowledge following implementation of the law in Uruguay. METHODS: We interviewed 207 eligible women seeking abortion services at a high-volume public hospital in Montevideo in 2014. We generated univariate frequencies to describe women's experiences in care. We conducted regression analysis to examine variations in experiences of stigma by women's age and number of abortions. RESULTS: Most of the women felt that abortion was a right, were satisfied with the services they received, and agreed with the abortion law. However, 70% found the five-day waiting period unnecessary. Women experienced greater self-judgement than worries about being judged by others. Younger women in the sample (ages 18-21) reported being more worried about judgment than women 22 years or older (1.02 vs. 0.71 on the ILAS sub-scale). One quarter of participants reported feeling judged while obtaining services. Women with more than one abortion had nearly three times the odds of reporting feeling judged. CONCLUSIONS: These findings highlight the need to address abortion stigma even after the law is changed. Some considerations from Uruguay that may be relevant to other jurisdictions reforming abortion laws include: the need for strategies to reduce judgmental behavior from staff and clinicians towards women seeking abortions, including training in counseling skills and empathic communication; addressing stigmatizing attitudes about abortion through community outreach or communications campaigns; mitigating the potential stigma that may be perpetuated through policies to prevent "repeat" abortions; ensuring that younger women and those with more than one abortion feel welcome and are not mistreated during care; and assessing the necessity of a waiting period. The rapid implementation of legal, voluntary abortion services in Uruguay can serve in many ways as an exemplar, and these findings may inform the process of abortion law reform in other countries

Articulations of blackness: Journeys of an emplaced politics in Colombia

This dissertation explores the changing relation between Afro-descendants' ethno-racial identities and territoriality in Colombia. This interest emerges out of two key events in recent Colombian history. The first is the passage of Law 70, which granted cultural and territorial rights to black communities of the Pacific watershed and institutionalized the relation between "territory" and "black culture" in Colombia. The second is an important shift in the logic of Colombia's armed conflict, which in the late 1990s increasingly focused on territorial control. I analyze the current moment of exacerbated violence as a critical conjuncture in which the articulation of blackness and territoriality is unmade and remade; as both tragedy and opportunity. The historical turning point for this analysis is a 1996 paramilitary attack in the department of Chocó, which marked the beginning of a brutal wave of violence that has since enveloped the Pacific region. I contend that this irruption of violence created a new conjuncture that brought about a significant rearticulation of ethno-territorial blackness. In order to trace the multiple shapes that black politics have taken since, I follow a multi-sited ethnographic approach that looks at processes of political mobilization, local livelihoods and landscapes, and dynamics of violent and nonviolent mobility. In Bogotá, I examine processes of subject formation amongst black IDPs (internally displaced persons) in an urban peripheral neighborhood. I also analyze the shifts in discourses and strategies employed by Colombia's two main black organizations, as well as their changing dynamics with state entities and NGOs that deal with forced displacement. Finally, I analyze the practice of "emplaced" blackness by looking at land tenure, landscaping practices, and livelihoods in a black community with a titled collective territory. Overall, I argue that ethnic blackness in Colombia has become linked to an emergent politics of victimization and a resurfacing of African diasporic networks of racial solidarity. Thus, I show that the various articulations of blackness are not only matters of identity politics, but also lie at the heart of struggles over the definitions of nature, the right to dwell and move, and the creation and management of victimized subjects

Articulations of blackness: Journeys of an emplaced politics in Colombia

This dissertation explores the changing relation between Afro-descendants' ethno-racial identities and territoriality in Colombia. This interest emerges out of two key events in recent Colombian history. The first is the passage of Law 70, which granted cultural and territorial rights to black communities of the Pacific watershed and institutionalized the relation between "territory" and "black culture" in Colombia. The second is an important shift in the logic of Colombia's armed conflict, which in the late 1990s increasingly focused on territorial control. I analyze the current moment of exacerbated violence as a critical conjuncture in which the articulation of blackness and territoriality is unmade and remade; as both tragedy and opportunity. The historical turning point for this analysis is a 1996 paramilitary attack in the department of Chocó, which marked the beginning of a brutal wave of violence that has since enveloped the Pacific region. I contend that this irruption of violence created a new conjuncture that brought about a significant rearticulation of ethno-territorial blackness. In order to trace the multiple shapes that black politics have taken since, I follow a multi-sited ethnographic approach that looks at processes of political mobilization, local livelihoods and landscapes, and dynamics of violent and nonviolent mobility. In Bogotá, I examine processes of subject formation amongst black IDPs (internally displaced persons) in an urban peripheral neighborhood. I also analyze the shifts in discourses and strategies employed by Colombia's two main black organizations, as well as their changing dynamics with state entities and NGOs that deal with forced displacement. Finally, I analyze the practice of "emplaced" blackness by looking at land tenure, landscaping practices, and livelihoods in a black community with a titled collective territory. Overall, I argue that ethnic blackness in Colombia has become linked to an emergent politics of victimization and a resurfacing of African diasporic networks of racial solidarity. Thus, I show that the various articulations of blackness are not only matters of identity politics, but also lie at the heart of struggles over the definitions of nature, the right to dwell and move, and the creation and management of victimized subjects