The dissertation examines how Colombian professionals have developed reproductive laws and policies during the past century in the name of being modern. I focus on four moments of reproductive lawmaking from 1936-2006, analyzing legal and sociolegal texts that record or inform the lawmaking process. These four moments of reproductive lawmaking are the 1936 Colombian Criminal Code, which increased penalties for men’s sexual crimes as well as abortion; two 1960s policies that promoted family planning; the 1991 Constitutional Assembly and the debate whether to include a comprehensive reproductive right, libre opción a la maternidad (free motherhood) in the new constitution; and the 2006 Colombian Constitutional Court decision C-355, which decriminalized abortion in three instances.

Studying each moment reveals Colombian professionals – lawyers, politicians, highly educated feminists, doctors, and others – participating in knowledge discourses which construct a particular approach to reproduction as the necessary course of action if Colombia would be modern. In 1936, Colombian lawyer-politicians employed legal positivist science to scrutinize sexual crimes and develop a rule of law in keeping with other liberal, modern states. During the 1960s, a community of Colombian doctors and politicians developed family planning policies in an attempt to curb rapid population growth. Grounded in the ideas of transnational population studies, the Colombian professionals feared “overpopulation” would undermine Colombia’s ability to prosper socially and economically, leaving Colombia “behind” modern nations. The 1991 Colombian Constitutional Assembly shows a commitment to inclusive democratic politics and women’s equality to counter representations of the country as violent and the state as incapable of governance. Finally, the 2006 Constitutional Court decision decriminalizing abortion portrays Colombia as an equal partner with other states in promoting women’s rights through international human rights.

The dissertation shows how Colombian professionals’ understandings of current challenges facing the state interact with knowledges based in other countries or developed in transnational circles; and that the discursive construction of these knowledges as the “modern” approach towards law and women’s reproduction generates both pressure and enthusiasm among professionals to enact these knowledges in reproductive lawmaking. Based in transnational feminisms, I use the term “geopolitics of knowledge” to refer to how social, economic, and political forces shape the circulation of knowledge discourses and effects across transnational space; as well as to how relations of power at a transnational scale affect how knowledges circulate and how, when, and who participates in a given knowledge, or “takes it up.” The dissertation shows that conceptions of modernity change over time, with implications for legal approaches towards reproduction and women’s reproductive lives.