Suchergebnisse

In the wake of the 1997-1998 Asian financial crisis, the Republican-controlled Congress was able to use the International Monetary Fund's need for capital to press for major reforms within that organization. The debate became more complicated when antiabortion advocates attempted to add antiabortion language to appropriation bills. In a showdown between the executive & legislative branches, Congress ultimately dropped the abortion language, but the issue of linking funding to abortion policy continues to surface in budgetary debates concerning international organizations.

Research Highlights and Abstract This article Explains how a historical account may be usefully combined with an analysis of the constitutive representation of gender in order to provide insights into the substantive representation of women; Provides an empirical account of how MPs favouring restrictions on legal abortion have historically constructed women as victims of unethical doctors in order to undermine the foundations of the 1967 Abortion Act; Helps explain recent attempts to strip abortion providers of the ability to provide counselling; Demonstrates that when set against the medicalised regulatory regime established by the 1967 Act, the contributions of pro-choice MPs may be criticised as problematic attempts to reconcile a feminist abortion politics with the status quo. In 2011, Parliament debated an amendment to the government's Health and Social Care Bill which would have mandated that abortion counselling be provided by independent organisations. While many attacked the amendment as anti-feminist, its principal sponsor, Nadine Dorries, claimed to be acting on behalf of women. This article argues that a historical approach may be fruitfully utilised in order to make sense of such conflicting 'feminist' claims. Through analysis of parliamentary debates, it demonstrates that when historical and discursive context is taken into account, the Dorries amendment can be viewed as part of a broader attack on the foundations of the 1967 Abortion Act. This historical approach also allows the contributions of pro-choice women representatives to be criticised as problematic attempts to reconcile a feminist abortion politics with the status quo.

AbstractAfter a 35‐year‐long constitutional ban on abortion, the Eighth Amendment was repealed in May 2018 and the Health (Regulation of Termination of Pregnancy) Act 2018 was introduced in the Republic of Ireland. Although "Repeal" and the legalization of abortion marked a significant transformation in reproductive governance, many aspects of the new abortion policy continue to complicate abortion care access and provision. In this article, I explore the mobilizations of health and rights in political discourses on abortion after legalization. In doing so, I identify how moral governance operates in post‐Repeal abortion politics. I critically consider restrictive strategies in abortion politics in Ireland and compare these to a number of recent key anti‐abortion tactics in the United States. As such, I situate post‐Repeal and post‐Roe abortion debates within parallel temporalities of abortion governance and highlight the adaptability of discourses on health and rights in shifting legal contexts.

Since the early 1990s, post-abortion care (PAC) has been advocated as a harm reduction approach to maternal mortality and morbidity in countries with restrictive abortion laws. PAC indicators demonstrate that the intervention integrates safer uterine aspiration technology such as the Manual Vacuum Aspiration (MVA) syringe into obstetric practice and facilitates task-shifting from physicians to midwives. In other words, PAC not only saves women's lives, but more generally enhances the organization, quality, and cost-effectiveness of obstetric care. This article draws on my ethnography of Senegal's PAC program, conducted between 2010 and 2011, to illustrate how PAC indicators obscure the professional and technological complexities of treating abortion complications in contexts where abortion is illegal. Data collection methods include observation of PAC services and records at three hospitals; 66 in-depth interviews with health workers, government health officials, and NGO personnel; and a review of national and global PAC data. I show how anxieties about the capacity of the MVA to induce abortion have engendered practices and policies that compromise the quality and availability of care throughout the health system. I explore the multivalent power of MVA statistics in strategically conveying commitments to national and global maternal mortality reduction agendas while eliding profound gaps in access to and quality of care for low-income and rural women. I argue that PAC strategies, technologies, and indicators must be situated within a global framework of reproductive governance, in which safe abortion has been omitted from maternal and reproductive health care associated with reproductive rights. Ethnographic attention to daily obstetric practices challenges globally circulating narratives about PAC as an apolitical intervention, revealing not only how anxieties about abortion ironically suppress the very rates of MVA utilization that purportedly convey PAC quality, but also how they simultaneously give rise to ...