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Sterilization is endorsed as a method of family planning by international governmental organizations; abortion is not. Focusing on policy development for these two issues in a single country, Peru, we ask how power and inequality operate under conditions of global consensus or dissensus. The case of sterilization unfolded the way many previous research studies would predict, with Peruvian state actions corresponding to a global diffusion process. We find that global consensus provided cover for top-down actions that violated the human rights of indigenous women in the country, who were predominantly poor, non-Spanish speakers, and residents of the mountainous, sparsely populated parts of the country. With respect to abortion in Peru, in the absence of global consensus, the state resisted calls for change, advocacy networks have worked at cross-purposes, and a powerful local actor, the Catholic Church, has effectively blocked liberalization efforts. As with sterilization, however, marginalized indigenous women and their interests were rendered invisible.

This paper examines the implications of the disability rights critique of prenatal testing on the development of genetic policy and abortion rights. It traces the reappearance of the disabled body in public deliberations over reproductive and genetic politics that use disability to frame arguments about which bodies are worthy of protection, how and why we limit reproductive choices, and what reasons women may use to terminate their pregnancies. The disability critique of prenatal testing and selective abortion finds itself in productive tension with reproductive rights politics, which increasingly features disability in both pro-life and pro-choice messages. The uneasy alliance between disability and pro-life interests has profound implications for both disability legal scholarship and the sociolegal inquiry into the role of rights articulation – and rejection – by social movements.

In 1920 Margaret Sanger called voluntary motherhood “the key to the temple of liberty” and noted that women were “rising in fundamental revolt” to claim their right to determine their own reproductive fate (Rothman, 2000, p. 73). Decades later Barbara Katz Rothman reflected on the social, political and legal changes produced by reproductive-rights feminists since that time. She wrote: So the reproductive-rights feminists of the 1970s won, and abortion is available – just as the reproductive-rights feminists of the 1920s won, and contraception is available. But in another sense, we did not win. We did not win, could not win, because Sanger was right. What we really wanted was the fundamental revolt, the “key to the temple of liberty.” A doctor’s fitting for a diaphragm, or a clinic appointment for an abortion, is not the revolution. It is not even a woman-centered approach to reproduction (2000, p. 79).

Sterilisation in India (and globally) has a contentious and deeply politicised history. Despite this troubling legacy, India continues to rely on female sterilisation as the main form of contraception and family planning. Abortion, which has been legal under broad grounds since 1971, intersects with sterilisation at different points over women's reproductive lifecourse. Drawing on three case studies exploring women's abortion trajectories in Karnataka, India (2017), this chapter examines sterilisation as a reproductive technology (RT) in women's abortion narratives. These include experiences of failed sterilisation necessitating abortion, as well as narratives around pre- and post-abortion counselling with sterilisation conditionalities. Women report healthcare workers shaming or scolding them for not being sterilised after their last pregnancy – demonstrating the prominence of sterilisation as an enforced social norm using ‘health’ frames. Using reproductive justice (RJ) as a lens, I analyse how sterilisation interacts with abortion and the narratives of shame and stigma that surround the two technologies and make visible the ways in which it results in the denial and restriction of women's reproductive freedoms.

With an aim to investigate the recent state of the feminist clinics and their negotiation of medical authority in a time of increased technoscientific biomedicalization, and capitalistic health-care system, I conducted a study of two feminist health centers in the Northeast of the United States in 2001–2002. In this chapter, I discuss how the two centers (a nonprofit collective and a for-profit center with a more hierarchical structure) negotiated medical authority in organizational terms as impacted by the larger context of medicine and its interaction with the state, capitalist health-care system, and antiabortion forces. The chapter concludes with a discussion of demedicalization as a multilevel process and implications for feminist care (service delivery) and U.S. Women's Health Movement.

Purpose: Miscarriage is commonly understood as an involuntary, grieve-able pregnancy outcome. Abortion is commonly understood as a voluntary, if stigmatized, pregnancy outcome that people do not typically grieve. This chapter examines a nexus of the involuntary and voluntary: how people who chose abortion following observation of a serious fetal health issue make sense of their experience and process associated emotions.

Design: The author draws on semi-structured interviews with cisgender women who had an observed serious fetal health issue and chose to terminate their pregnancy.

Findings: Findings highlight an initial prioritization of medical knowledge in pregnancy decision-making giving way, in the face of the inherent limits of medical knowability, to a focus on personal and familial values. Abortion represented a way to lessen the prospective suffering of their fetus, for many, and felt like an explicitly moral decision. Respondents felt relief after the abortion as well as a sense of loss. They processed their post-abortion emotions, including grief, in multiple ways, including through viewing – or intentionally not viewing – the remains, community rituals, private actions, and no formalized activity. Throughout respondents’ experiences, the stigmatization of abortion negatively affected their ability to obtain the care they desired and, for some, to emotionally process the overall experience.

Originality/Value: This chapter offers insight into the understudied experience of how people make sense of a serious fetal health issue and illustrates an additional facet of the stigmatization of abortion, namely how stigmatization may complicate people’s pregnancy decision-making process and their post-abortion processing.

Starting from an event occurring in 2018, I consider burials of abortive remains as a battleground for reproductive governances. Public debate on pregnancy loss is often intertwined with the abortion debate. In Italy this association caused a considerable delay in implementing practices recommended by international guidelines on pregnancy loss. In this essay, I analyse burial regulations and the ways in which they are enforced asking what is at stake when the State, the regions, the Catholic Church, healthcare and cemetery professionals and women undergoing a termination or a pregnancy loss decide what to do with bodily remains. What is the meaning of these peculiar dead bodies? How are they publicly named? What are the effects of the actions performed on fetal remains over the lived experiences of women and couples with different reproductive histories? Who has the right to make decisions over these peculiar bodies and relationships?

Based on a long-term ethnography on abortion and pregnancy loss in Italy, I explore the inherent complexity of these questions, arguing that burial practices conflict with abortion rights when they signify the body unequivocally, separating it from social and intimate relationships, fixing its identity and determining the conditions for its recognition. Human flesh, sociologically understood (Memmi, 2014), is both material and symbolic: a fluctuating reality that takes on different meanings and affects over time within relationships.