Log in to star items.
- Convenors:
-
Inga Koralewska
(Australian National University)
Agnieszka Balcerzak (LMU Munich)
Joanna Mishtal (Lehigh University)
Send message to Convenors
- Chair:
-
Inga Koralewska
(Australian National University)
- Formats:
- Panel
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.
Accepted papers
Session 1Paper short abstract
As the U.S. grapples with the Dobbs decision and expanded abortion bans, Looking Back, Learning Forward, an interdisciplinary oral history project, documents the efforts in Rhode Island on all sides of the issue, from Roe to the passage of legislation affirming the right to abortion in 2019.
Paper long abstract
Looking Back, Learning Forward is an interdisciplinary oral history project researching, documenting, and analyzing the efforts of activists and political leaders on all sides of the issue from Roe v. Wade in 1973 through 2019, when the U.S.’s smallest and most Catholic state passed legislation affirming the right to abortion. This period of recent Rhode Island history has never been thoroughly documented. Our research reveals the impact of both laws restricting or banning abortions and cultural norms that create de facto bans that can prevent abortion knowledge and access and limit the discussion of abortion in the public sphere. Now, as the U.S. grapples with the impact of the Dobbs decision, an increased number of state abortion bans, and the lack of federal protections for abortion, Looking Back, Learning Forward aims to provide insight into how activists and political leaders might think about addressing the web of different state laws and cultural norms across the U.S. that impact access to abortion care. In Rhode Island, as in much of the U.S., polling repeatedly showed support for Roe, yet enacting legislation required understanding the impact of laws, building campaigns, electing new representatives, and engaging in the democratic process. Similarly, the path to getting the message out required understanding social and cultural norms, including how they can both reinforce bans and provide grassroots activists multiple entry points to attempt to make change and destigmatize views around abortion.
Paper short abstract
Abortion activists in Peru enact decolonial practices of community care based in the Quechua cosmology of aynikawsay, or everyday reciprocity. In communicating their lived experiences they work to normalise abortion as healthcare which can be facilitated beyond the limitations of state institutions.
Paper long abstract
Abortion activists in Peru enact the Quechua community value of ayni, or reciprocity, as part of their daily lives. Their engagement with ancestral indigenous practices is no mistake, rather, it is evidence of a purposefully decolonial approach to reproductive justice influenced by a regional history of repeated reproductive violence by the state. Peruvian abortion activists consider the significant impact of institutional discrimination such as racism and classism on the accessibility of safe reproductive healthcare. Their intersectional approach challenges the status quo which perpetuates hierarchies of who deserves abortion access based on age, class, race, circumstance and vitally, political affiliation. Through the incorporation of several creative and informative modes of storytelling, abortion activists continue to jeopardise their own personal safety for the wellbeing of their community on a daily basis. From artwork and public performances of song and dance to radio programmes, podcasts and zines, abortion activists in Peru communicate lived experience of gender-based violence. These practices are influenced by indigenous and ancestral creative practices and accommodate present-day cultural accessibility obstacles. In doing so they assert their commitment to serve community members who face these injustices and dedicate their own vulnerability to a safer future for all. Ayni (reciprocity) indicates a cyclical relational dynamic of community mutual care. It is in this decolonial practice of care as one which is continuously exchanged in small daily iterations that the Quechua cosmology of aynikawsay, or everyday reciprocity, becomes an apparent strategy for the normalisation of abortion as healthcare beyond the limitations state institutions.
Paper short abstract
Drawing on current fieldwork in India the paper explores how legal activists creatively promote litigation strategies to do with Medical Termination of Pregnancies (MTP), 'routinising' access to abortion, de-stigmatising discrimination amongst judges and challenging juridical governance.
Paper long abstract
India has in the past few years had a slew of landmark judgements which have expanded the scope of the Medical Termination of the Pregnancy Act (1971) widening the ambit of reproductive rights, for example, to include the expansion of the window of termination to 24 weeks and the right to reproductive autonomy of women with disabilities. The paper explores the micro-legal processes at work, drawing on current fieldwork on the strategies of legal aid activists, lawyers and judges to throw light on the dynamic interpretation of the law by judges and activists expanding access and contributing to the de-stigmatisation of abortion in the country. In doing so we critically examine the power and challenges involved in emerging forms of juridical reproductive governance.
Paper short abstract
Advance provision of medication abortion involves providing abortion pills before pregnancy. This exploratory study describes motivations, feelings, and opinions related to advance provision in Poland. Our results suggest that advance provision can enhance autonomy and well-being in abortion care.
Paper long abstract
Advance provision of medication abortion involves providing abortion pills before pregnancy. It has the potential to avoid delays caused by legal and logistical barriers to abortion care. Having abortion pills on hand may also reduce the stigma and stress associated with abortion care-seeking and facilitate early access to abortion. This exploratory study describes motivations, feelings, and opinions related to advance provision in Poland.
We analyzed 648 advance provision consultations and follow-up surveys (response rates: survey 1 = 36.4%, survey 2 =17.2%) received by Women on Web from Poland in 2022–2023.
Our results show that the most common reasons for requesting advance provision were legal restrictions, unavailability of pills, and the comfort of at-home abortion. In addition, we detected three overarching themes: avoiding access problems; gaining peace of mind, control, safety, and security; and community use.
This study highlight the potential of advance provision of abortion pills as a response to legal, logistical, and emotional challenges faced by individuals in Poland seeking reproductive autonomy and safe abortion. Advance provision seems to allow people to have abortions earlier and can convert into a form of community care, which aligns with the conceptualization of early abortion as a self-care practice. Further research is needed to understand uses and experiences with advance provision in diverse settings.
This study adds to the growing body of evidence on the potential of advance provision as an innovative strategy to circumvent restrictions and enhance reproductive autonomy and well-being in abortion care, particularly—but not exclusively—in restrictive settings
Paper short abstract
Paradoxical mobilization in abortion politics in Germany: how legal restrictions and strategic selectivities triggered public counteraction by doctors and activists, fostering solidarity and reshaping struggles over reproductive autonomy.
Paper long abstract
In Germany, abortion is regulated in the criminal code and classified as “unlawful, but not punishable” if the pregnant person follows a strictly prescribed procedure, illustrating continuous criminalization. The failed attempt at legal liberalization in February 2025 highlighted the ongoing political contestation surrounding reproductive rights.
Drawing on Bob Jessop’s strategic-relational approach, the paper analyzes how state restrictions produce strategic selectivities that make public resistance by professional actors increasingly likely. It asks under which conditions professional support turns into collective political activation.
Empirically, the paper draws on interviews conducted and analyzed within a grounded theory research framework shortly before the repeal of §219a of the German Criminal Code. Until summer 2022, this paragraph prohibited doctors who perform abortions from informing about their services online. Only through protest by activists and criminally charged doctors did a public awareness of the paradoxical ban on medical information emerge, revealing further contradictions in obtaining a non-punishable abortion.
The paper shows how these developments can, paradoxically, be traced back to the assertive legal invocation of §219a by individual “anti-abortion” actors. The interviewed doctors emphasized the empowering function of their public counteraction, which they saw as unavoidable to draw attention to perceived injustice. The solidarity of feminist activists enabled the considerable scale of public attention. Ultimately, highly restrictive actors contributed to liberalization tendencies in the field of abortion.
The paper provides an empirically grounded perspective on current struggles over reproductive autonomy and demonstrates how resistant practices emerge and become publicly effective under restrictive regulation.
Paper short abstract
Based on qualitative study conducted in the Netherlands with abortion providers and activists, I discuss the feminist concept of “abortion work”. I demonstrate how this concept can be applied to abortion providers and activists and I investigate its informal and non-medicalised dimensions.
Paper long abstract
Based on an ethnography conducted in the Netherlands, this presentation discusses and build on the overlooked feminist concept of “abortion work”, defined as all the tasks that women have to organise to terminate a pregnancy (Mathieu and Thizy, 2023; O’Shaughnessy, 2024). By providing qualitative analysis from 17 interviews conducted with sexual and reproductive health professionals, pro-choice feminists, and experts as well as a selection of public documents, I demonstrate how the concept of abortion work can be applied to these different individuals in addition to women seeking an abortion. In particular, I investigate three dimensions of informal and non-medicalised aspects of abortion work that I argue are particularly invisible: a) logistic and financial work, b) emotional work, c) countering anti-abortion forces. Finally, by making use of a feminist social reproduction perspective, this presentation opens up the discussion on the broader invisible reproductive work that women accomplish in patriarchal capitalism.