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Paper short abstract

When French abortion centers face early pregnancies invisible on ultrasound, some impose two-week waits while others practice abortion immediately. These protocols create barriers and inequalities in abortion access, revealing how abortion temporality is actively produced.

Paper long abstract

This presentation examines how time operates as a medium of polarisation in abortion care through the case of “early pregnancies of unknown location” (GLI) in France. When women seek abortion very early in pregnancy (before 4 weeks of pregnancy), before the embryo is visible on ultrasound, French medical centers adopt radically different temporal protocols. Some impose systematic waiting periods of up to two weeks until the pregnancy becomes visible, requiring repeated ultrasounds, vaginal examinations, and blood tests—imposing significant logistical constraints and possible psychological costs. Others offer immediate abortion followed by hormonal monitoring. While both protocols claim medical legitimacy, they generate profound inequalities in access to care.

Drawing on six months of daily ethnographic observation in three French abortion centers and 140 interviews with healthcare professionals, this presentation analyzes how these temporal arrangements—waiting lists, ultrasound timing, diagnostic delays, hormone measurement schedules—produce barriers and asymmetries in reproductive healthcare. The analysis reveals how doctors may invoke legal constraints to women seeking abortion that do not actually exist, how secretaries perform “filtering work” by imposing delays at the telephone stage, and how some women slip through protocol exceptions while others do not.

The choice between protocols depends on physicians' dispositions and may generate negotiations and conflicts within medical teams. By examining these negotiations, the presentation demonstrates that gestational temporality is not an objective biological fact but is actively produced through medical technology and its uses.