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Short abstract:

In the context of abortion, Latour’s (2010) ‘Factish’ is engaged to appreciate the relationship between facts and belief. Beyond the mundanity of paper and text, a pro-life pamphlet is shown to acquire agency beyond the collective work through which it emerged. The human-pamphlet is born.

Long abstract:

“We must, with our words, also give the baby a face and make her a part of our human family” (Gans Turner and Spaulding Balch, n.d., p. 9).

The quote by Gans Turner and Spaulding Balch (n.d.) is from a ‘package’ of text for ‘pro-life’ actors on the language to use when engaged in debate about abortion. Implicit in this quote is the active fabrication of a reality beyond the mundanity of paper and text.

Drawing on ethnographic research conducted at an abortion provider in Aotearoa New Zealand, we step outside to the gate that borders the setting. Sometimes there are protesters at the gate, chanting, praying, and holding out pamphlets, but not today. The pamphlets are on the ground, woven into the wire lattice of the gate, and crammed in the spaces between the fence posts. In the absence of the protestors who seek to disrupt the work of abortion provision, it is the pamphlet itself does the ‘talking’.

Latour’s (2010) concept of ‘factish’ is taken up as a strategy to attend to pro-life textual devices. The term ‘factish’ is a way of thinking about the relationship between facts and beliefs and how nothing is distinct from its fabrication. Nonetheless, knowing a fact is constructed, does not make it less real or displace its power and transformative effects. This account attends to the process of fabrication and the way mundane objects like a pamphlet can acquire certain qualities or agency beyond the collective work through which they emerged.