Conceiving Cuba: Reproduction, Women, and the State in the Post-Soviet Era

4. Abortion and Calculated Risks

68 On a cool February afternoon in one of Havana’s outer suburbs, I climbed the steep stairs to the second floor apartment of Idaly Santos. Idaly was a single mother whose gregarious manner concealed a fierce independence. Over the past decade, her mother and siblings had slowly scattered to the United States and to France, leaving her the sole occupant of her large apartment. These relatives were also the source of an ample and dependable flow of income, prompting her to leave her job as an administrator in the state’s tourism sector and rely exclusively on this transnational flow of capital. The previous year, feeling lonely after the recent departure of most of her family, and with her daughter already grown with her own child, she had decided to take advantage of her comfortable household economy to have another child, despite her single status. “Independent reproduction!” she triumphantly proclaimed with a smile. Drawn to her outgoing nature, and eager to hear more of her rather unusual reproductive history, I was delighted when she agreed to a formal interview. Idaly met me at the top of the stairs, cradling her three-month-old son, and waved me into her spacious living room. Expecting a private interview, I was rather taken aback to hear the loud thump of reggaeton (a recent Latin Carribbean musical genre) on the stereo and the laughter of the ten or so people drinking rum from small plastic cups. Brushing away my apologies, Idaly ushered me into a small curtained bedroom to begin our interview. As I began my routine explanation about my research on reproduction, she suddenly interjected , “I’m a super-mother, a super-grandmother, I’m forty-one years old and I just had my son three months ago!” We laughed as I agreed that she was unusual in a cultural context where most women tended to have their children much younger. “It’s true,” she told me, proudly declaiming, “I’m a modern woman, 4 Abortion and Calculated Risks ABORTION AND CALCULATED RISKS 69 not like some women around here. I’ve had twenty-four abortions and only two children. I follow the modern norms of developed countries.” Her declaration highlights an apparent contradiction: in highlighting her advanced maternal age and low fertility, she aligns herself with women from developed countries whose low birthrates are considered to index their modernity. Indeed, while troubling to the state’s long-range planning, Cuba’s below-replacement fertility is commonly interpreted in large part as evidence of Cuba’s social modernity, as women both limit and postpone their births in favor of education and careers (Benítez 2003).1 Debates over abortion practices thus take place in the context of state anxiety about the demographic challenges that Cuba will face given its rapidly aging population and its inability to fully reproduce its labor force. Proposals to bolster the birthrate by limiting access to abortion are not unknown; during one conference I attended, a male scholar in the audience argued that if not for abortion, there would be a million more Cubans alive today. However, this is a minority view, and the Federation of Cuban Women (FMC) and other Cuban officials and academics have constantly reiterated their support for abortion as a “social gain that cannot be lost” (Heredero 2011). At the same time that she stakes her claim to modernity through her low fertility, however, Idaly’s means of achieving this status—the use of repeated abortion—is frequently viewed in the health and development literature as a traditional form of fertility limitation that represents the failure of the population to embrace a “modern” reproductive decision making, as anthropologists have often noted (Johnson-Hanks 2002; Paxson 2004). According to the teleological narratives inherent to development discourse, with the modernization of the population, women should embrace rational, risk-averse reproductive practices that decrease both their risk of an unwanted pregnancy and of complications resulting from an abortion. Yet Cuba’s abortion rates, among the highest in the world,2 continue to be of concern to medical and public health officials and are considered an anomaly in the country’s otherwise modern demographic profile (Benítez 2003). At the heart of these conflicting interpretations of abortion practice are contested definitions of nurturance, modernity, and social progress, as women and the state consider the problems of reproducing children, households, and modern female citizens in post-Soviet Cuba. Cuban studies recognize the role that...