Send message to Authors

Paper short abstract

Gestational age assessment operates as a temporal technology shaping access to abortion and pregnancy care. This paper explores how divergent dating practices, professional positionalities, and activist engagements produce multiple reproductive temporalities and how researching those unfolds.

Paper long abstract

Gestational age (GA) assessment is a pivotal yet underexamined temporal technology in reproductive healthcare. Across Europe, heterogeneous protocols, instruments, and epistemologies used to date pregnancy generate discrepancies that shape access to abortion, pregnancy care, and childbirth options. Rather than treating these discrepancies as technical inconsistencies, this paper approaches GA assessment as a site where reproductive temporalities are actively produced, negotiated, and politicised, showing how time itself can become a medium of polarisation in reproductive care.

Drawing on the PregDaT project, a comparative qualitative study conducted in France, Greece, Italy, and the UK, the paper explores how clinical timelines, legal gestational limits, and bureaucratic delays produce asynchronous relations that structure decision-making and access to care through analysing interactions, interviews and observations involving healthcare professionals, pregnant people, and transnational abortion-support NGOs.

Central to the analysis is a reflexive attention to researcher positionality and to the negotiation of fieldwork across distinct professional worlds. The paper argues that reproductive ethnography itself becomes a temporal practice of one kind: one that both reveals how polarisation is sustained through discordant rhythms, while also highlighting moments of alignment among actors.