Short Abstract

This panel explores how feminist and pro-choice actors navigate and resist authoritarian restrictions on abortion, using digital tools, cross-border networks, and destigmatization strategies to reframe reproductive rights debates beyond polarisation.

Long Abstract

In recent years, authoritarian tendencies and the growing influence of conservative moral politics have reshaped access to abortion across diverse geopolitical contexts. From the near-total ban in Poland and tightening restrictions in Hungary, to post-Roe v. Wade regressions in the United States and criminalization in El Salvador and the Philippines, abortion has become a key site where gendered governance and moral politics converge. While restrictions tighten, feminist and pro-choice movements develop creative strategies to bypass censorship, evade criminalization, and build infrastructures of care and information-sharing. In the polarising world, these movements silently preconfigure the utopian reality based on feminist values and non-profit care.

This panel invites contributions that examine how women, pregnant people, activists, healthcare providers, and digital communities organize local/transnational solidarity networks to seek and provide abortion care under restrictive regimes, including for example, creating access to self-managed medical abortions, encrypting communication, and care-sharing practices. We are particularly interested in how such strategies not only circumvent state or other controls but also challenge the moral and affective dimensions of stigma attached to abortion. How do abortion seekers and activists reframe abortion as an ordinary aspect of reproductive life rather than a polarising moral issue? How do narratives of solidarity, and bodily autonomy circulate across borders and digital spaces? And how do processes of (de)medicalization and other resistance tactics shape understandings of abortion, influencing the legitimacy and the accessibility of abortion care?

By comparing cases from varied socio-legal, geopolitical and cultural settings, this panel seeks to map practices of resistance, communication, and destigmatization that transform abortion politics beyond binaries of legality and morality.

Propose paper