key: cord-0898002-mb6y20jf
authors: Baird, Barbara; Millar, Erica
title: Abortion at the edges: Politics, practices, performances
date: 2020-04-28
journal: Womens Stud Int Forum
DOI: 10.1016/j.wsif.2020.102372
sha: f8a4dffb3e2c147a4b7c594d4ceac1f82cedfb5d
doc_id: 898002
cord_uid: mb6y20jf

Abstract This article provides a brief overview of the state of discourse, politics and provision of abortion in the Anglophone West, including developments in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic. It then surveys three promising directions for feminist abortion scholarship. The first is work inspired by the Reproductive Justice Movement, that points to the intersectional axes of inequality that shape abortion discourse and position us in relation to reproductive choice and access issues. The second is work that examines the particularity of the constitution of the aborting body, reflecting the particularity of the pregnant body. This is a specific body, with a specific history; abortion discourse draws from and makes a significant contribution to the meaning and lived experience of this body. The third area of scholarship we highlight is that which seeks to amplify the meaning of abortion as a social good. Much abortion scholarship is attuned to a critique of negative aspects of abortion—from its representation in popular culture to restrictive law and access issues. This is critical work but/and the performative nature of abortion scholarship, like all discourse, means that it can amplify the association of negativity with abortion. The article concludes by introducing the articles contained in the special section of Women's Studies International Forum, ‘Abortion at the edges: Politics, practices, performances’.

J o u r n a l P r e -p r o o f (2020), the COVID-19 pandemic has already led to widespread contraceptive shortages and the reduced availability of abortion worldwide; the organisation warns that the resulting ‗loss of health, autonomy and life' will have ‗catastrophic' consequences for women and girls. Restrictions on abortion within the Anglophone West also bear most directly on the most marginal women. For example, the closure of abortion clinics resulting from US TRAP (Targeted Regulation of Abortion Providers) laws is felt most acutely by minority women, who in pre COVID-19 times were having abortions at later gestations because of difficulty accessing the necessary resources to travel to obtain an abortion (Solazzo 2019) . The closure of clinics in the wake of COVID-19 (Abrams 2020) will likely have similarly stratified consequences for those seeking abortion. In Canada, which became the first country to completely decriminalise abortion in 1988, access to abortion in rural and remote areas is virtually non-existent, and women requiring abortions post 24 weeks must travel to the US (Shaw & Norman 2019) . Women in many other countries also face the burdens of the need to travel (Sethna & Davis 2019).

While illegality and low socioeconomic status remain major obstacles in accessing abortion, the increasing accessibility of medical abortion is making clandestine abortion safer (Singh et al. 2018) . Sydney Calkin (2019) argues that medical abortion, especially in conjunction with feminist activist strategies to make it available (often illegally), means that 'abortion access is becoming less connected to physical clinic spaces and, by extension, less tethered to national legal frameworks' (23). The impact of medical abortion is also significant in overcoming geographical barriers when legality is not an issue (Hyland, Raymond & Chong 2018; Upadhyay J o u r n a l P r e -p r o o f UK-founded, now international, journal Feminism and Psychology produced a special issue on abortion in 2017, as did the Harvard University based Health and Human Rights Journal which has subsequently devoted more special issue space to abortion.

In the social sciences the concept of abortion stigma has been a dense site of scholarship since Kumar, Hessini and Mitchell's ground-breaking work over a decade ago (2009). The Turnaway Study in the US, the first longitudinal comparison of the outcomes of women who received an abortion with those who were turned away, is another noteworthy contribution (Ralph, Foster & Rocca 2020 (Sheldon et al. 2019) . Elsewhere in the humanities contemporary feminist theory about affect and emotion has been brought to bear on the ways that the political construction of the emotions frames abortion discourse (Millar 2017 (Ross 2017: 291) . It also draws attention to the relationship of abortion to other norms and practices of reproduction: the choice of abortion can only be considered autonomous in a meaningful way if the alternative choice of motherhood is viable, materially, socially and discursively (Ross & Solinger 2017) . Disability is one node of inequality that intersects with others to shape the material and discursive worlds of reproduction. Australian disability activist Nicole Lee (2019), who uses a wheelchair, writes of how her decision to have an abortion was, in a reversal to the stated norm, interrogated far less than her decision to become a mother. The stigma of disabled parenting can manifest in coercive practices, most notoriously in sterilisation, which women with disabilities continue to experience disproportionately compared to the able-bodied (Wu et al. 2019 ). Discourses of able-bodiedness also variegate abortion stigma. Claire Mckinney (2019) argues that women who are otherwise nonstigmatised (white, heterosexual, married, economically stable, able-bodied mothers)

can deploy the ‗tragic narrative of fetal abnormality' to recuperate their choice of abortion to narratives of ‗fit motherhood': thus, their status as deviant reproductive subjects is avoided at the expense of re-stigmatising disability. projection of anxieties about ‗whose subjectivity, whose forms of intimacy and interests, whose bodies and identifications, whose heroic narratives-will direct America's future ' (1997: 6) . Barbara Baird (2006) reads theoretical work on white patriarchal supremacy, a mode of governmentality that can only be maintained through ‗constant ritual repetition' (215), alongside a history of maternal citizenship for white women in Australia to argue that ‗Debate over abortion (like debate over immigration), particularly during times of intensified race politics, is both a displacement activity where anxious white nationalists can performatively reinstate white power and also the literal performance of the control of national reproduction, the forceful attempt to make like reproduce like' (215). The nostalgic longing for the past that animates many contemporary restatements of white national belonging contains a powerful reproductive dimension that is only beginning to be theorised. In an important contribution to this project, Sarah Franklin and Fay Ginzburg argue that Trump's reproductive politics do not signify a break with the past but are, rather, a particularly virulent rearticulation of a ‗tragically familiar grammar' that draws powerful links between ‗traditional gender roles and family values, opposition to gay marriage, the right to gun ownership, and opposition to abortion within an overarching white settler narrative of lost American greatness' (2019: 3-4). Race and gender form nodes in a more complex arrangement, which is inflected with class, (dis)ability, and the other axes of identity that form the idealised family arrangements under the neoliberal state, stripped of public health and social services.

In the contemporary era, the fusion between race, reproduction and nation in relation to abortion politics is also acutely waged in the process of creating and recreating borders. Scholars have documented how, across several different contexts, state restrictions on the reproductive autonomy of asylum seekers is particularly draconian. Ruth Fletcher (2014) documents a case of an acutely suicidal asylum seeker and survivor of rape who was refused an abortion by the public health authority in Ireland in 2014. Her asylum status prevented her from following the route to Britain then routinely taken by Irish abortion-seeking women. The woman was forced to continue with the pregnancy until she was 25 weeks' pregnant, when she was forced to undergo a caesarean delivery. Writing before the important constitutional amendments of 2018, Fletcher argues that this ‗abortion refusal … reiterates just how unethical and rights-violating the substance of Irish Abortion law is … [and how it] discriminates against women in general, and women with mentalhealth issues, women with few economic resources and women with limited mobility options, in particular ' (2014: 14) . Kevin and Agutter (2018) (2016) documents, the reproductive coercion enacted at the level of the state towards asylum seekers extends beyond abortion to other areas of reproductive health; in, for example, creating conditions that make continuing with a pregnancy and raising a child unviable. Unhygienic and unsafe birthing conditions and policies of indefinite detention punish parents and children alike.

Scholars and activists must continue to examine and unpack the multiple modalities of power that delineate access to reproductive choices, the broader social and cultural significance and meaning of reproductive choices, and reproductive politics more broadly. Such work forms an important critique of neoliberalism, a mode of governmentality that works to camouflage the oppressive structures that continue to act on and through individual subjects (Millar 2017) . Dissection of the multiple and complex battles that are waged through the politics of reproduction also has much to tell us about the social and cultural worlds that we inhabit, including, as we have emphasized here, projects of nation building and the making of national communities.

The politics of abortion contribute to the creation of states and nations and they also where women's access to abortion is largely dependent on wealth and the distance needed to travel. Like Gleeson on the past, and indeed common observation of the present, Oberman points out that it will be ‗individual actors, rather than official policies' that will make the difference in a post-Roe future (134). Both authors challenge readers to identify the political mythologies that shape our thinking about the past, present and future, and open space for greater complexity.

The work of critiquing dominant discourses, conservative political developments and problematic assumptions does not, however, exhaust analysis of all possible experiences or ways to think about abortion. We mention a handful of texts here to illustrate some of the possible ways in which abortion scholarship that focuses on the ‗positive' and innovative pushes conceptual boundaries and creates pathways that might lead us beyond current epistemological, political and service provision regimes.

There is a rich (if minority) vein of scholarship which has focused on successes in the struggle for abortion rights and access to services. One such example is Kirtz and Lundy's documentary film (1996) and Laura Kaplan's history (1997) of the Chicago based feminist abortion service Jane (of which Kaplan was a member).

Jane operated for four years in the period before the Roe v Wade decision; it began as a referral service, offering counselling and support, and transformed into a service that offered abortions performed by women it had trained. Jane assisted over ten thousand women, many who would not have been able to afford an abortion anywhere else, many of them black. Kaplan wrote to record the history of a little- Two contributions to the collection examine the strategies and discourses of anti-abortion activists. Prudence Flowers provides a historical account of a foundational tension between two groups of US anti-abortion activists: ‗extremists' who argue that abortion should be banned entirely, and ‗moderates' who argue for exceptions on grounds such as rape and fatal foetal anomaly. By arguing that this tension is irresolvable, Flowers dispels any notion that the anti-abortion movement is a united political force, thus demystifying some of the power and authority with which it is often invested. Pam Lowe and Sarah-Jane Page examine the rhetoric and framing devices that motivate anti-abortion activists to picket abortion clinics in the UK. They argue that this form of activism (or, seen differently, harassment) is driven by the idea that women need to be ‗saved' from service providers who are motivated by profit, and that the discourse of ‗saving women' they deploy is rooted in Christian beliefs aimed at ensuring souls go to heaven. Their work adds to scholarship that demonstrates the gendered paternalism that runs through much abortion law, politics and discourse and views women as vulnerable and in need of protection.

Our final pair of articles contribute research to knowing about and working with women who have abortions in the second and third trimesters of pregnancy. In different ways, the articles provide space for the voices of individual women who have had this experience. Trish Hayes, Suzanne Hurley and Chanel Keane are counsellors who work with women seeking abortion in Melbourne, Australia. They write about some of the major psychosocial issues faced by women who are seeking an abortion between 18-24 weeks of pregnancy and ways in which they help women navigate having a procedure that is highly stigmatised. Like all contexts for abortion, those around second/third trimester abortions are diverse and contested. Hayes, J o u r n a l P r e -p r o o f J o u r n a l P r e -p r o o f

COVID-19 could permanently make abortions harder to access nationwide

Advancing New Standards in Reproductive Health) 2019. Abortion Onscreen in 2019

Who seeks abortions at or after 20 weeks?

Rethinking reproductive politics in time, and time in UK reproductive politics

Reproductive politics in the age of Trump and Brexit

Trauma of rape‖ discourse: A double-edged template for everyday understandings of the impact of rape?

The Other Abortion Myth-the Failure of the Common Law

Cultural conceptions: On reproductive technologies and the remaking of life

Reproductive coercion and the Australian state: A new chapter

Hospitals Providing Abortion Services

Coronavirus: GP visits regarding abortions to take place remotely. Irish Times

Visualising abortion: Emotion discourse and fetal imagery in a contemporary abortion debate

The agnotology of abortion: A history of ignorance about women's knowledge of fertility control. Outskirts: feminisms along the edge

Abortion "can now be carried out

Fighting to choose: The abortion rights struggle in

A good abortion is a tragic abortion: Fit motherhood and disability stigma

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Different and not equal: The uneven association of race, poverty, and abortion laws on abortion timing

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When the punishment is pregnancy: Carceral restriction of abortion in the United States

Queering abortion rights: Notes from Argentina

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Characteristics of women who present for abortion beyond the legal limit in Flanders

Rethinking the mantra that abortion should be -safe, legal, and rare‖

Abortion: A review of South Australian law and practice

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