Silent Screams in Maghreb Cinema: Depictions of Abortion in the films The Silences of the Palace (1994) and Razzia (2017) Abstract: Pop-cultural messaging and coding of abortion begins with the release of the silent film Where Are My Children? in 1916. Films depicting pregnancy terminations were unquestioned locales for political and religious ideologies. In recent years, with the rise of reproductive health and rights discourses, visual representations of abortion have been critiqued for their reductionist pro-life and pro-choice binary, particularly, in the cinema of the United States. These critiques attempt to depoliticize abortion to allow new micro and macro narratives to materialize. As a result of revisionist reproductive health methods of analyses, abortion narratives, presently, encompass gender struggles, power structures, class discourse, biopolitics, medical racism and eugenics. In the case of North Africa and the Middle East, conversations around abortion are still stuck within the rhetoric of religion, morality, and purity culture. Comprehensive examinations of abortion depictions in Maghreb cinema, specifically, mirror colonial, nationalist, political, socio-historical, patriarchal, racial, gender and class struggles. The Tunisian film The Silences of the Palace (1994) and the Moroccan film Razzia (2017) bear the trappings of these intersecting oppressive systems where women’s bodies are controlled and colonized. Introduced as subplots, the stories of abortion in these two films divulge a sense of agency and empowerment, which is rarely seen in Arab cinema. Drawing on studies of filmic reproductive agency (Minarich) and on the possibilities of widening reproductive health grounds in the Arab world (El Feki), these visual representations necessitate exploration to further dilate on the discourse on abortion. Key words: reproductive rights, abortion, colonialism, Maghreb cinema