Abstract

Reproductive health in general, and abortion in particular, are complex and extremely sensitive issues in Chilean society. Therapeutic abortion was allowed in Chile during the 20th centu-ry, until in 1989 it was banned and criminalized absolutely. Between 1989 and 2017, when the law that restored the right to terminate pregnancy on three specific grounds was enacted, it remained that way: clandestine, silenced and penalized. However, women continued to interrupt their pregnancies for diverse reasons. During this period, medical anthropologist Mónica Weis-ner Horowitz carried out systematic research on induced abortion among low-income women, creating a matrix for sociocultural analysis of the phenomenon, and spreading the results of her work in various spaces of analysis, discussion and decision-making. Thereby, she contributed to the understanding of the multifactorial and multidimensional complexity of induced abortion, from a transdisciplinary perspective in public health. The quantitative and qualitative results of her research constituted for decades part of the few data available on this phenomenon, since there were no official statistics or open spaces for visibility. Additionally, from her experience, she trained a generation of medical anthropologists, who today contribute from various spaces to a sociocultural approach to public health