Review of four books on women of color and reproductive justice: Jennifer Nelson, WOMEN OF COLOR AND THE REPRODUCTIVE RIGHTS MOVEMENT; Jael Sillimen, Marlene Gerber Fried, Loretta Ross, & Elena R. Gutierrez, UNDIVIDED RIGHTS: WOMEN OF COLOR ORGANIZE FOR REPRODUCTIVE JUSTICE; Dorothy Roberts, KILLING THE BLACK BODY: RACE, REPRODUCTION, AND THE MEANING OF LIBERTY.
Review of four books on women of color and reproductive justice: Jennifer Nelson, WOMEN OF COLOR AND THE REPRODUCTIVE RIGHTS MOVEMENT; Jael Sillimen, Marlene Gerber Fried, Loretta Ross, & Elena R. Gutierrez, UNDIVIDED RIGHTS: WOMEN OF COLOR ORGANIZE FOR REPRODUCTIVE JUSTICE; Dorothy Roberts, KILLING THE BLACK BODY: RACE, REPRODUCTION, AND THE MEANING OF LIBERTY.
Black feminism, women of color studies, reproducitve justice, pro choice, Jennifer Nelson, Dorothy Roberts, Jael Sillimen, Marlene Gerber Fried, Loretta Ross, Elena R. Gutierrez
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 ...
On 28 October 2012, Savita Halappanavar, an Indian woman living in Ireland, died in hospital while under medical care for a miscarrying pregnancy. According to her husband, her repeated requests for an abortion were ignored because of the presence of a foetal heartbeat. Ms Halappanavar's death was a critical event in the process leading to a referendum on 25 May 2018, when the Irish electorate voted to repeal the Eighth Amendment of the Constitution, removing the constitutional ban on abortion. The name Savita has become indelibly linked to the changing course of abortion politics, so it is timely to reassess the role of the media in shaping the parameters of the debate about the impact of her death on the issue. This study presents a frame analysis of Irish newspapers in the weeks following her death, mapping the political, medical, legal and socio-ethical discourses, as well as the related contemporaneous events that set the agenda for the type of debate that was to follow. It identifies four media frames: Public Tragedy, Political Opportunity, Abortion Legacy and Maternal Health. Our central argument is that the overall effect of media framing provided much face-saving for politicians in the way that the legislative issue was viewed through a conservative party-political lens, despite public outrage.
Following Stella Creasy's recent emergency debate on reforming Northern Ireland's strict abortion laws, Fran Amery explains why the intervention is an extremely significant event, not just potentially for Northern Ireland, but for decriminalisation in Britain as well.
"Performing abortion" typically refers to what health care providers do in clinics, private offices, and (rarely) hospitals 1.21 million times per year,every year, in the United States. At the same time, the phrase indicates what performance artists, choreographers, and activists have been doing on stages, in galleries, and on the streets for decades. Candelario is intrigued by this double meaning that invites us to take seriously what abortion means at this political and historical moment, but also what performance, activism, and the concerted actions of bodies can do. This article offers some introductory thoughts on these intertwined issues, and represents the beginning of a larger project Candelario is conducting. "Performing Abortion: FeministCultural Production after Roe v. Wade" wasconceived with the premise that the examination of performances of and about abortion by feminist artists and activists may reveal productive strategies for reframing the abortion debate in the United States.
AbstractThis paper examines one of the most notorious, yet largely overlooked, provinces in terms of abortion access in Canada: New Brunswick. Through an exploration of the provincial government's activities and litigation in the province, this article traces the history of abortion regulation in New Brunswick, with particular attention paid to the manner in which social movement activism has shaped policy. It argues for the need to reframe abortion as a matter of equal citizenship. Specifically, it suggests that such a rethinking could generate political pressure for recognition and improved services, and stimulate a public discourse that has the potential to begin breaking down the more complex, extra-legal barriers faced by women in Canada.RésuméCet article examine l'une des provinces les plus notoires, mais pourtant grandement négligée, en termes d'accès à l'avortement au Canada, c'est-à-dire le Nouveau-Brunswick. À travers un examen des activités du gouvernement provincial et des litiges dans la province, cet article explore l'histoire de la réglementation de l'avortement au Nouveau-Brunswick, en portant une attention particulière à la façon dont l'activisme du mouvement social a contribué à façonner les politiques. Il fait valoir la nécessité de resituer le contexte de l'avortement comme une question d'égalité des citoyens. Plus spécifiquement, il suggère qu'une nouvelle façon de penser pourrait créer des pressions politiques pour la reconnaissance et l'amélioration des services et stimuler une discussion publique qui pourrait peut-être commencer à éliminer les obstacles plus complexes et extrajudiciaires auxquels les femmes font face au Canada.
This essay explores the genre of the mommy memoir for its abortion politics. Buildingon feminist critiques of the genre's reliance on bio-essentialist ideas of motherhood, Iconsider both the potential and limitations within the genre for representing abortionexperiences. In this essay I analyze Irene Vilar's Impossible Motherhood:Testimony of an Abortion Addict (2009) for its rhetorical appropriation of themommy memoir form in order to tell a story of reproductive excess.
Despite the growing body of research on the emotion of disgust – including its relationship to political ideology, moral judgment, matters of sex and sexuality, and death – the global reproductive rights movement has paid relatively little attention to the role disgust plays in the debate over abortion. By focusing on the right of a woman to make her own decision about an unwanted pregnancy, the pro-choice community has allowed anti-choice groups to define and frame the abortion procedure, abortion providers, and women who have abortions in terms associated with disgust. This commentary encourages further examination of what triggers disgust, its measurement, and ways of mitigating it, which could be useful for reducing abortion stigma, in future legal cases and in abortion research, advocacy, and communications.
This editorial provides an overview of a thematic series that brings attention to the persistently deficient and unequal access to sexual and reproductive health services for young women in sub-Saharan Africa. It represents an effort to analyze the multifaceted relationship between laws, policies and access to services in Ethiopia, Zambia and Tanzania. Using a comparative perspective and qualitative research methodology, the papers presented in this issue explore legal, political and social factors and circumstances that condition access to sexual and reproductive health services within and across the three countries. Through these examples we show the often inconsistent and even paradoxical relationship between the formal law and practices on the ground. Particular emphasis is placed on safe abortion services as an intensely politicized issue in global sexual and reproductive health. In addition to the presentation of the individual papers, this editorial comments on the global politics of abortion which represents a critical context for the regional and local developments in sexual and reproductive health policy and care provision in general, and for the contentious issue of abortion in particular.
In the twenty years since the collapse of communism in the Eastern Bloc, various scholars of history, women's studies, sociology, political science, and reproductive rights have studied the occurrence of abortion in these formerly communist countries. Although some have sought to question the notion of "abortion culture," most look to these countries as places where abortion was tragically prevalent and accepted. The purpose of this paper is to analyze the assumed knowledge concerning abortion and how this obscures understandings of abortion in formerly communist countries of Eastern Europe. By creating genealogy of "abortion culture," this research seeks to trace the history of how abortion came to be understood as a moral issue, the power behind these understandings, and the resulting consequences. Throughout history, abortion has been understood many different ways until evolving into the understanding that it is negative, it is a moral issue, it is a medical issue, it should be limited, and should only occur rarely. These taken for granted understandings have shaped how abortion in formerly communist countries have been researched and discussed. Beyond academia, these understandings have resulted in a pairing of communism and abortion designed to discredit both.
Women's sexual and reproductive rights are politicized worldwide, with the most contentious right being the right to safe, legal abortion. In Latin America, where one stands on the issue of abortion has become a central identity marker; a salient issue in electoral mobilization, and a matter of coalition building and high politics. As a consequence, legalized contestation over abortion is raging across Latin America, and indeed much of the world. This article conceptualizes this as "abortion lawfare" and develops a framework for analyzing the complex dynamics and long-term, multisited strategies at play in the wars over abortion. The concept of lawfare – despite and, to some extent, because of its ideological uses and connotations – serves as a useful heuristic tool for grasping these dynamics, and the lawfare typology brings out the different facets of the phenomenon in terms of actors, strategies, and arenas and provides the basis for analyzing how, in any given context, actors face multiple and shifting opportunity structures. This, in turn, influences the strategies they pursue and what is achieved. ; Os direitos reprodutivos e sexuais das mulheres são politizados ao redor do mundo, e o direito ao aborto legal e seguro é o mais controverso. Na América Latina, o lugar que certa pessoa ocupa no debate sobre aborto se tornou um marcador central de identidade, uma questão importante na mobilização eleitoral e um elemento de construção de coalizões e de política. Como consequência, a contestação jurídica sobre aborto está ocorrendo em toda a América Latina e, na verdade, em grande parte do mundo. Este artigo conceitua isso como "abortion lawfare" e desenvolve uma abordagem para analisar a dinâmica complexa e as estratégias multilocalizadas de longo prazo em jogo nas guerras pelo aborto. O conceito de lawfare – apesar de e, em certa medida, por causa de seus usos e conotações ideológicas – serve como ferramenta heurística útil para compreender essas dinâmicas, e a tipologia de lawfare traz à tona as diferentes facetas do fenômeno em termos de atores, estratégias e arenas, além de fornecer a base para analisar como, em qualquer contexto, os atores enfrentam estruturas de oportunidades múltiplas e dinâmicas. Isso, por sua vez, influencia as estratégias que eles perseguem e os resultados que alcançam.
New modes of neoliberal and rights-based reproductive governance are emerging across the world which either paradoxically foreclose access to universal health services or promote legislative reform without providing a continuum of services on the ground. These shifts present new opportunities for the expansion but also the limitation of abortion provision conceptually and 'on-the-ground', both in the Global North and South. The collection of papers in this special issue examine current abortion governance discourse and practice in historical, socio-political contexts to analyse the threat posed to women's sexual and reproductive health and rights globally. Focusing on abortion politics in the context of key intersectional themes of morality, law, religion and technology, the papers conceptually 're-situate' the analysis of abortion with reference to a changing global landscape where new modes of consumption, rapid flows of knowledge and information, increasingly routinised recourse to reproductive technologies and related forms of bio-sociality and solidarity amongst recipients and practitioners coalesce.
In her Introduction to the inaugural issue of the Columbia Journal of and Law (JGL), Ruth Bader Ginsburg traced the gendered history of Columbia Law School from 1928, when the first female student was admitted, to 1990, when women composed nearly half the student body. Reflecting on this change, she asked, "Does women's participation affect the way law business is conducted, and the shape and direction of legal development?" In pursuing this "large question," Justice Ginsburg contemplated a feminist movement that would offer "a spacious home" for "all who have the imagination and determination to work for the full realization of human potential."