Gendered Wounds: On Abortion and Partnership in Cuba

Introduction

Abortion has a long and contradictory history in Cuba. Beginning in 1965, early-term abortion became part of the revolutionary government’s efforts to modernize and develop the country by decreasing poverty and facilitating women’s entrance into the socialist labor force (Cruz 2006; Pérez 2014; Alvarez et al. 2013; Belanger and Flynn 2009). In the five decades since its introduction—as access to the procedure became free, safe, convenient, and indispensable to countless women—it has allowed Cubans to live fuller, more dignified lives by delaying or averting parenthood.

However, as feminist essayist Adrienne Rich writes, “abortion is hardly the ‘final triumph’ envisaged by all.” It is hardly the fulfillment of women’s “highest dreams” nor “the embodiment of liberation” (Rich 1976, 266; Daly 1972, 112). Rich’s view that troubling questions regarding women’s equality lie beneath and beyond the issue of abortion certainly applies to the Cuban case. The prevalence of sexual assault and domestic abuse (the risk of which has worsened during the coronavirus pandemic) (Rodríguez Fuentes n.d), women’s double burden, and the underrepresentation of traditionally female jobs in Cuba’s cuenta-propista economy (sanctioned private economy) (Vasallo Barrueta 2001; Núñez Sarmiento 2001) are daily reminders that women are not afforded the same opportunities to pursue their desires and ambitions as men. Abortion access in this patriarchal social context—while liberatory in significant ways—simultaneously evokes women’s oppression.

At the outset of my research in 2016, I often heard Cubans frame abortion as a wound inflicted by men on women or as a practice that allowed men to go on harming women, as evidenced in the following perspectives, culled from my interviews: A pediatrician in her 40s told me she finally left her husband after he got too drunk and forgot to bring her home from the hospital after her abortion. “The worst part is that he completely forgot I was pregnant,” she said. Another example of some men’s indifference arose in a discussion with market vendors in Centro Habana. One man explained, “If it weren’t for abortion, all women would be giving birth like hogs. At least abortion helps them deal with the problems that men give them.” At a maternity hospital nearby, an obstetric nurse appeared to confirm men’s general carelessness when she stated, “You see all those women there waiting? Their boyfriends don’t even know they are here.”

On the surface, these testimonies indicate men’s general disinterest in pregnancy and abortion, its practicalities, and its implications. Yet, as I argue in this essay, a closer evaluation of couples’ intimate experiences over time reveals a more nuanced picture. Rodrigo, the aforementioned father of two, for example, deeply cared about his role in reproduction, evidenced by his attentiveness to, and love of his children, and by his clear desire, along with this wife, to avoid bringing more children into the world. His engagement with the reproductive process instantiates how many Cuban men are concerned participants.

During my research with middle-class and working-class, heterosexual and cisgender couples in Habana between 2016 and 2020, I found that men played an active role in women’s reproductive decision-making and significantly influenced their views of abortion, often transforming its stigmatized associations. But the experiences articulated by the couples in this study also reflect the limits of shared experience. Unequal dynamics underpinned many of these relationships in ways that reflect broader gender disparities in Cuban society at large. Significantly, the expectation that regulating birth is a woman’s duty—an expectation reinforced by men’s failure to use contraception—goes beyond the interactions of individual couples. Sherry Ortner has pointed out that a “woman’s body space, for a greater percentage of her lifetime, and at sometimes great cost to her personal health, strength, and general stability is taken up with [the process of reproduction]” (Ortner 1972; De Beauvoir 1953). Though biology imposes obvious mandates, the widespread view that women are naturally constituted to endure the physical tolls and suffering resulting from reproduction is a social construction. Feminist anthropologists have long shed light on the cultural discourses and structural dynamics that naturalize these beliefs (Ortner 1972; Rosaldo and Lamphere 1974; Rubin 2012; Scheper-Hughes 1989; Abu-Lughod 1993; Visweswaran 1997).

Where anthropological perspectives of fatherhood and masculinity are concerned, the works of Marcia Inhorn, Sallie Han, Rayna Rapp, Mathew Gutmann, and Mathew Dudgeon have shed light on men’s influence on everything from pregnancy, to infertility, to domestic dynamics, and sexual practices. Building on that work, I interrogate the predominant narrative that constructs men as absent participants in reproductive events. I consider where men figure in intimate accounts of abortion and, beyond this, the degree to which men share in women’s responsibilities, affectations, doubts, and decision-making on immediate and mediate life projects. I situate abortion within the broader context of gender relations to show how men’s influence can lead to the normalization of abortion even as inequities and power disparities between genders are reinforced by the assumption that women should repeatedly rely on abortion.

This article discusses Cuban men’s attitudes and emotions, their expression (or non-expression) of these attitudes to their partners, and how the significance of abortion for each partner is generated through everyday interaction and reflections on a shared past (Gutmann 1997; Kimmel, Hearn and Connell 2005; Inhorn et al. 2009). I examine the various means through which this was done, including dialogue, joking, arguing, or consoling one another in the lead-up and aftermath of abortion, the experience of shared residence, and the extent to which men and women were active participants in each other’s lives. Women and men’s conversations and interactions revealed that reproduction’s material and structural constraints like gestational limits on abortion, housing inadequacies, and resource shortages directly affected their views of abortion and the place it occupied in their lives. Yet economic difficulties shaped couples’ views of abortion as ethical or unethical in unexpected ways. By considering a plurality of voices, my argument builds on Yanagisako and Collier’s notion that “models of homogeneity among men falsely and inexorably lead to the notion that there is a unitary ‘man’s point of view’ whereupon confusion often results when the dominant ideology is equated with the point of view of men” (1987, 26–27, Gutmann 1997).

Finally, using the concept of the “wound” as an analytical framework, I discuss abortion as an event that, though physically painful for women and emotionally painful for both parties, opens up the possibility of envisioning different, more hopeful futures. The work of anthropologist Laurence Ralph shows how the physical wounds of men injured during gang violence in inner city Chicago have social lives that extend into the future. These wounds, when displayed and talked about within the community, create the “precondition for repairing social relations” by enlisting others to “disrupt a cycle of vengeances” (Ralph 2012, 3). In the case of Cuban men and women, the wounds left by recurring abortion—both physical and symbolic—work to allow for the creation of ethical imaginaries—that is the framing of abortion as not simply a reckless mistake, but also a moral act. Discussing abortion with men and women at different moments in their lives over the course of several years (from 2016 to 2020), allowed for the possibility for thought to open up through time and new knowledge and interpretations of the past to arise (Garcia 2016, 588). By returning to the same people and places over the course of 5 years, I have sought to document experience and knowledge not as pre-formed but rather as social processes that are always in the making.

Historical Perspectives on Abortion and Contraception

Abortion, practiced during centuries of Spanish colonization, first appeared in the colonial criminal code toward the end of Spanish rule in 1870 (Casasús 1941; “Código Penal 1870”). Despite this codification, the practice was never penalized with any regularity. Doctors and midwives provided clandestine abortions for a fee in towns and villages throughout the island and continued to do so during post-independence years (after 1898) and into the period of U.S. hegemony (1902–1959). During those years, many women had never heard of the diaphragm, which—along with the later arriving “nylon ring,” condoms, and the pill—were only available to a handful of urban elites (Pérez 2014, 92).

The first brigades of state-trained doctors learned early on that thousands of women were dying from unsafe and unsanitary abortions—both self-induced and carried out by inexperienced private doctors (Cruz 2006). Improvised access to abortion thus arose out of revolutionary forces’ need to mitigate the death and suffering of women across the island. Throughout the 1960s and 1970s, leagues of young doctors trained in Cuba’s first state-run medical schools began providing abortions in rural outposts before abortion became officially legal in 1979. Once these services were established, they were extended to provincial hospitals and clinics. In my interviews with older Cubans, many men and women could recall various folk methods used to “bring back a woman’s period” before abortion became sanctioned. These methods included drinking hot beer with aspirin, inserting blunt objects or parsley stems into the vagina, drinking water infused with abortive herbs, and repeatedly flushing the vaginal canal with soap and water. In 1979, the revolutionary government legalized abortion and the procedure became officially available on demand until the end of the first trimester (until 12 weeks gestation), a relatively stringent time limit that remains in effect today.

Decades later, in the 1980s and 1990s contraceptives methods like the IUD, condoms, and the hormonal pill, were made available at subsidized costs (Andaya 2014, 44). But these were not always easy to find and all but disappeared during the period of internationally imposed austerity and scarcity that followed the collapse of the Soviet Union, Cuba’s closest ally and economic partner—years known as the Special Period (1991–2005). During this time, access to contraceptives grew more difficult and so abortion became more prevalent. Hospitals were able to keep providing the procedure to anyone who needed it. In the last decade and a half, access to contraception has markedly improved (Espinosa et al. 2018). Today, myriad methods of contraception, such as the arm implant, the copper and hormonal IUDs, and the Depo-Provera shot are available at little cost at doctor’s offices and pharmacies throughout the island.

The current widespread availability of contraception should not be taken to mean that preventing birth no longer poses challenges for Cubans. Even though 77.1% of women between the ages of 12 and 49 years use some form of birth control, they often do so incorrectly or inconsistently (Espinosa et al. 2018, 4). Many women I interviewed used abortion and birth control intermittently at various moments in life and resorted to abortion when the hormonal pill presented health problems. This practice of complementing contraception with abortion is not unique to Cuba, however. Despite some scholars’ claims that Cuba has an exceptional “abortion culture,” a reliance on this method is typical of post-Soviet contexts like in Russia and Vietnam and is used across liberal societies to supplement birth control practices (Gammeltoft 2003; Rivkin-Fish 2005). As reproductive scholar Rosalind Petchesky affirmed: “Abortion and contraception are not simply alternatives, they are, as family planning specialists tell us, complexly interrelated, even interdependent” (Petchesky 1990, 168).

Moreover, several studies have established that Cubans use birth control inconsistently because they are unsatisfied with their effects. The IUD and the hormonal birth control pill were considered uncomfortable, faulty, painful, and damaging by many Cuban women while condoms were viewed as inadequate for long-term use by both men and women (Belanger and Flynn 2009, 14; Andaya 2014, 85). The view that condoms were inappropriate for stable relationships was pervasive among the men I interviewed. Only one man claimed to always use condoms with his long-time girlfriend.

Cuban studies show that young women in particular are more likely to misuse contraception or begin using it after their first unwanted pregnancy. Sex education for young people, while available in school, has failed to significantly expand contraceptive use, leading both to a high teenage birth rate and to an even higher rate of teenage abortion (Espinosa et al. 2016, 282; O’Farril et al. 2015). Though not considered a safer option, abortion was often the method that many women fell back on. Cuban women express concerns about the risks and side effects of contraception, including unregulated weight gain, breast cancer, and mood swings. To be sure, they also worried about abortion. They particularly feared the risks of surgical abortion and, although they were largely satisfied with their access to care, many were dissatisfied with the degrading treatment they received in clinics. “The nurses say awful things to you,” one woman said, “while I was waiting, a nurse passed by us and said, ‘You look like cows lined up for slaughter!’”

Tense Dynamics, Ruptures in Affect

“I could still remember the scene in which each of the girls who were waiting for their turn […] would casually say: ‘this thing’s goin’ out today.’ […] There is something wrong with a country whose women go get abortions en masse” (Echarry 2014). Reporter Irina Echarry’s description captures a common sentiment among the Cuban public: that young women with “low education” or “baja cultura” recklessly and casually terminate pregnancies. This perception creates an atmosphere of intolerance, obstetric violence, and social stigmatization that makes the moments of urgency and tension that surround unwanted pregnancy especially difficult for young couples.

The experiences of Rubén and Miriam shed light on this phenomenon. Rubén, a coy 31-year-old from rural Granma province, met Miriam, a Habanera, when he was 18 and she, 17. He had just moved to the capital and was enthusiastic about landing in a job in construction that paid in convertible pesos. Just a couple of months into their relationship, Miriam got pregnant. Shaken up by having her first sexual encounters result in pregnancy, Miriam hurried to the doctor for an early-term abortion. After recovering from the shock and shame of her procedure, things seemed to be on the mend, but just a few months later she got pregnant again. Miriam described that year of her life as turbulent, and as a sort of agonizing coming of age process. She asked Rubén, who had since moved into the house she shared with her mother, to leave while she processed her pain.

Rubén, confirming Miriam’s story, explained that Miriam’s distress was rooted in her belief that abortion constituted a personal moral failure. “She felt dirty. Like she was a common, promiscuous girl from the street. It weighed on her more than me,” Rubén said, acknowledging the stigma that teenage pregnancy carries for young women. Indeed, Miriam described the emotional fallout of her two pregnancies and abortions with powerful imagery. “My abortions caused my world to implode. I walked out of my princess castle and stepped into reality. But it was good also because one grows from what’s difficult, from one’s mistakes,” she said. “My dream was to walk up the steps of the university.” Miriam’s pain was accentuated by the implicit expectation that her pregnancy meant that she—and not Rubén—would sacrifice her education and working life to the care of a baby. Nevertheless, Miriam emphasized that Rubén played a central role in shifting her view. He helped her accept the notion that ending her pregnancies was prudent, in part by promising to take care of their future children. “[Rubén] took me out of a bad mindset,” she said. Rubén also believed he had contributed to helping Miriam through the process. He said,

After [Miriam’s] abortion, when she felt sad, I lifted her spirits. I told her ‘don’t worry, we’re right here!’ I lifted her out of her self-doubt. […] For me, being a man is always giving a bit more of yourself to make other people happy. Being someone with a strong mind, with convictions, someone that other people can lean on.

Rubén and Miriam clearly had respect for each other. This made their playful banter possible and enabled them to view Miriam’s abortions in a new light. In Catherine Lutz and Lila Abu-Lughod’s book Language and the Politics of Emotion, the authors define conversation as a “social practice with serious effects” that has “the power to move others.” Conversation can shape “the social relations in which [people] participate” (2008 [1990], vii). In Miriam and Rubén’s case, conversation was a powerful medium through which Rubén conveyed concern and support for Miriam, while humor helped shed abortion’s implications of failure and irresponsibility, transforming it from a symbolic and physical wound into a hopeful projection of their future together. As a reparative, humor helped Rubén and Miriam convey confidence without denying fragility. Ultimately, Miriam grew to view her abortions in a more forgiving light. She considers Rubén’s contributions to be central to this process.

Rubén and Miriam are still together and want to have children together in the future. The continuity of their relationship and their shared desire to have children has further normalized Miriam’s abortions. However, for many other couples, unwanted pregnancy and abortion can lead to a total breakdown of rapport. Unlike Rubén and Miriam, who were united in their decision to abort and years later can speak candidly of their ordeal, Raúl and Aida, a couple in their 20s, experienced both the unwanted pregnancy and what followed as a lasting trauma with uneven consequences.

Aida, a 22-year-old woman, met Raúl, who is now 29, when she was a high school student and he a university student finishing his degree in physical therapy. The day Aida learned she was pregnant, she also learned that the pregnancy was too far advanced for an abortion. She had traveled from Raúl’s parents’ house in the upscale Vedado neighborhood in Habana to the polyclinic up the street. She said:

You wouldn’t believe the pain I had in my stomach that day! I was grabbing onto the walls, but I didn’t imagine that I was pregnant. When I think about that now, I realize I should have been more vigilant. I have a very irregular cycle. I don’t bleed every month so when my period didn’t come I never worried that I might be pregnant. […] When I got to the clinic and the nurse performed an ultrasound, she said, ‘Congratulations, you are sixteen weeks pregnant. Do you want to know the gender?’ […] She crushed me with those words.

Anthropologists have argued that despite men’s often overlooked involvement in navigating and negotiating reproductive concerns, the consequences of reproductive decisions are almost always unequally distributed. Where deliberate legal and institutional protections for women are not in place, the burdens of reproductive labor disproportionately affect women. (Gutmann 2007; Kligman 1998; Gammeltoft 2003; Rapp 2000; Ginsburg and Rapp 1995; Andaya 2014; Inhorn 1994; Inhorn et al. 2009; Paxson 2002). The Cuban government’s attempts to redistribute reproductive work by instituting universal child daycare programs, a free laundry service, and laws to enforce child-support, have either failed entirely or are not effective enough at redressing gender inequity (Pérez 2015). Cuban men today continue to view reproductive labor as work that women are innately predisposed to (Andaya 2014, 98–113). Raúl’s refusal to learn how to change his son’s diapers, and later his departure to Venezuela for a multi-year mission, is evidence of the absence of both cultural and structural forces to hold him to account.

Managing the Everyday

The respective experiences of Miriam and Rubén and Aida and Raúl were characterized by significant tension. In what follows, I discuss couples who, rather than regarding abortion decision-making as a painstaking process, tended to view it as a practical tool to order the chaos of daily life. Men’s contributions in the establishment of this view are significant. Instead of regarding their wives’ recurring unwanted pregnancies as opportunities to change their sexual practices, these men sought to normalize abortion, framing it as a tactic for mediating life’s persistent difficulties.

Rodrigo, the 50-year-old father of two mentioned at the start of the article, is a chef at a government ministry. His wife, Yaima, is a special education teacher in her late 40s. They have been together for over 20 years. Rodrigo could not say how many abortions his wife had had, though he ventured a guess of eight. Yaima could not recall the number either.

In our conversations, Rodrigo continually embedded Yaima’s abortions in narratives about their daily struggles to make ends meet. “We were building an extra room, so we didn’t think it wise to have a baby while the house was under construction,” he said of one of the times his wife ended a pregnancy. Rodrigo also discussed the educational needs of his son, Jandro, with whom he spent many afternoons working on class assignments, so as to suggest that another child would have detracted from the care that his eldest son required. He and Yaima’s low salaries and the generally “bad conditions” in Cuba, as well as the unpredictability of his family’s remittances from the United States, also posed challenges at the hour of deciding whether or not to have a new baby. Rodrigo’s way of describing the need for abortion roundly left out the possibility that he was responsible for causing them. By discussing the need for abortion through narratives about precarity, Rodrigo indirectly normalized the notion that pregnancy was generally unavoidable in their relationship—or at least could not be avoided by changing his own sexual and contraceptive practices.

During our conversations, Yaima emphasized the economic dimensions of life, but she also focused on her body. She talked about how physically painful her abortions had been, and how they had “damaged her body”. She said,

My problem is that I don’t react well to contraception. The pill made my hormones explode and made a lot of peach fuzz grow on my face. I have a bad reaction when I’m on it. I used the IUD too, but when you don’t get it checked often like you’re supposed to, then it becomes a problem. Mine got lodged in my cervix and after they removed it, I never used birth control again. […] Birth control has a lot of problems…Look [turning to Rodrigo] Nelly has precancerous nodes in her breasts. It’s from the pill. […] Oh, I’ve interrupted many, many, many pregnancies. So many, in fact, that now I’m starting to suffer the side effects. When I was young, I never had pain in my lower abdomen and now, as a result of so many abortions, it has hurt me. Little by little abortion has damaged my body.

For Lidia, a music therapist, and her husband Ignacio, a bar manager at a state-owned hotel, abortion also represented a direct means of managing the demands of daily life. “For us it was not a trauma,” said Ignacio of the abortions Lidia had induced over the years. “You know in soap operas when they begin to cry like that? No. It was practical; it was simply not the right time.” Lidia explained that she usually went to the hospital by herself to complete the procedures, and that there was not much discussion between her and her husband. “Our attention is focused on our two daughters,” she said, “Nanita is just starting school and she needs a lot of supplies. The girls are also starting music lessons. […] These things are not just given to us!” Ignacio, who claimed he did not use condoms, expressed his indifference about Lidia using birth control. “Whether or not she uses the T [IUD], I don’t really care,” he said.

In January 2020, Ignacio was earning a stable salary in convertible pesos and Lidia was receiving remittances from her family in Texas. They too framed abortion as a means of managing the economic demands of daily life and providing a good life for their daughters. Ignacio said:

It’s not easy because the girls require a lot of things. You want them to have a nice childhood, you know? It’s important to me that they don’t spend all day on their tablets, that they play outside, that they tell me, “Dad, look how pretty the moon is.” Yesterday, they spent the whole day with a neighbor on the patio playing with a garden hose.

Men in long-term relationships, such as the two described here, defended their partners’ recurrent abortions by pointing to the Cuban state’s inability to provide for families. They described how low wages, the high cost of books and other materials, and the general hardships of supporting a family contributed to their decision to terminate a pregnancy—sentiments that Elise Andaya has documented among Cuban women (2014, 78–81). By casting blame for their partner’s abortions on economic difficulties, rather than on their own, sometimes loose, contraceptive practices, men obscured their role in causing pregnancy.

Imagining Alternative Futures, Personifying the Fetus

As months and years passed, couples often reassessed their experience of abortion. Spaces for contemplation opened up, enabling them to conjure up images and narratives about the children they chose not to have. Rubén and Miriam and Rodrigo and Yaima talked about their would-be children as if they existed, imagining how different their own lives might have been had they made different reproductive choices. In so doing, they created “ethical imaginaries,” which cast off abortion’s associations with personal moral failure and envisioned abortion and childbirth as equally possible, and equally moral, outcomes (Moore 2013).

Rodrigo and Yaima, who did not spend much time reflecting on Yaima’s pregnancies in the brief time that Yaima was pregnant, did reminisce about them years later, following the birth of their second son. When Yaima realized the fetus that she was carrying was another boy, she was taken by the idea that her “baby girl” was among the pregnancies she had terminated. Rodrigo related,

There are times when my wife…it makes one laugh, because when it comes time to face cleaning the house, she’s the only woman. She says, ‘I would like to have a girl too, someone to help me out! Imagine, it’s three males for me!’ And, well, there are female genes, my father had females, his father had lots of female and male children too. Maybe, who knows, if that one in the middle might have been the little girl, the negrita as we call her. [Does your wife say that, or do you say it too?] No, no, we say, I mean we all say that that one would have been the negrita. Because my two sons are, how we say here in Cuba, jabao [of mixed-race with light skin]. So, she would have been the negrita.

Miriam and Rubén too spoke speculatively and fondly about their would-be children. They chose names for their kids in the months following Miriam’s abortions, and talked about what they might have looked like. Miriam said, “We imagined what color skin they would have, what texture their hair would be. The girl would have been named Alysa and the boy, Renier.” Rubén said that in the nights following Miriam’s first abortion he had a dream that the embryo she carried was a boy. He had initially welcomed the idea of having the baby, and the notion of losing his first son saddened him. Believing that they could have made it so in spite of the hardships, Rubén said to Miriam, “I want to have kids with you. I’m ready whenever!” By imagining the children that they chose not to have, Rubén and Miriam also crafted a shared consciousness of abortion as an acceptable act that, while evoking poignant memories, did not need to be shameful.

One might be tempted to categorize these couples’ recollections of their aborted children as macabre. Yet, for Rubén and Miriam and for Rodrigo and Yaima, these projections of an alternative future filled with “unborn” children were roundly aspirational, imaginative, and playful if somewhat melancholy. Less like the commemorative practices parents use to mark the death of a child (Christensen and Sandvik 2014), these men and women’s descriptions were closer to those of expectant or hopeful parents in that they were imbued with imaginings of possible futures or alternate life paths.

As Rubén and Miriam’s, and Rodrigo and Yaima’s, discussions show, there is something about the unborn fetus that cannot be terminated since it was not quite “born” to start with (Han, Betsing, and Scott 2018; Dubow 2011). Aborted fetuses in this construction thus occupy a somewhat nebulous domain half-way between “not brought into life” and “existing without birth.” The image of this baby that never fully was, lives on in memory. Abortion may terminate pregnancies, but it does not terminate the expectancy and imaginings would-be parents engage in, which can continue long after the abortion has been performed. Discussing abortion with one’s partner, enables a kind of acceptance, even as it creates a longing for what might have been.

Conclusion

By considering the experiences of heterosexual cis women and their partners as they navigated abortion decisions in various personal contexts, this article has sought to build on Mathew Gutmann’s notion that gendered identities “develop and transform and have little meaning except in relation” to each other (Gutmann 1997, 400). Men’s influences on women and women’s influence on men led to the development of certain reproductive practices (while precluding others) and to specific ways of imagining pregnancy and its end (Inhorn et al. 2009; Dudgeon and Inhorn 2004; Gutmann 2007 [1996]). While the impetus to normalize abortion as yet another important, if imperfect, method of birth control often arises from Cuban women’s painful experiences with birth control, the role men play in normalizing abortion is far from insignificant. As these interviews repeatedly highlight, men’s practices, emotions, and beliefs are central to how women and couples frame abortion.

These framings are both co-constructed and contingent. Many of these couples’ narratives reveal a process of meaning making whose most salient feature is the importance of dialogue and the shared conditions of daily economic struggle. The process of co-constructing meaning clearly does not draw solely on each partner’s fully formed notions about abortion and parenthood. Rather, all of the factors in the couple’s social and economic environment come into play. Material circumstances—such as wages and the high cost of food, diapers, clothes—all come to bear on views of abortion as an ethical practice. For Rodrigo and Yaima, for example, their modest wages, the small size of their home, and their desire to prioritize the wellbeing of their sons served to frame the ethics of abortion.

Far from being weighed down by regrets about their reproductive choices, many Cubans have found ways within their relationships to push aside wider ethical constructs that are, as Michele Foucault argues, “proposed, suggested, imposed upon [them] by [their] culture, [their] society, and [their] social group” (Foucault 1998, 291; Moore 2013, 15), They do so, in part, by co-constructing meanings around abortion that Henrietta Moore might describe as “ethical imaginaries,” which is to say, “hopes, desires and satisfactions [that] attach us to the world, to ourselves and to others through imagination” (2013, 22). They create new moral ways of inhabiting the world. This is a process that necessarily goes beyond a single individual, becoming “the primary site for cultural invention because it engages with and refigures self-other relations […]” (Moore 2013, 18).

The stories that emerge from these interviews do not fit a single narrative, and we should resist the urge to reduce this polyphony of voices to a monotone. Men’s influences cannot be summed up in axioms about the general amelioration or aggravation of the inequalities surrounding reproduction. Men’s attitudes and actions, their roles within their relationships, and the gamut of responsibilities they accept and reject, vary widely. What is unambiguous, however, is that their involvement, while having potent effects on the way in which reproductive processes are interpreted and navigated, comprise ultimately voluntary acts. The bodily brunt of pregnancy and abortion—the physical destruction—cannot be shared.

Wounds, Laurence Ralph writes, are embedded in everyday social relations. They are simultaneously reminders of the violence people suffer at each other’s hands, and the ruins on which new moral futures can be built (Ralph 2012, 2–4). The gender dynamics discussed in this article have shown how men’s involvement in reproduction can advance the damaging expectation that women should give more of their time to the care of children, and that they should be solely responsible for preventing pregnancy and birth. However, men’s relationships with their partners also reveal unwanted pregnancy and abortion to be wounds that are profoundly shared and lived together. It is the shared quality of these experiences that allows men and women to confront abortion’s stigmas, casting off abortion’s associations with personal moral failure and allowing them to co-construct hopeful narratives about their lives.