Governing Bodies: Actors and Political Structures in the Contemporary Struggle for Reproductive Rights in Europe and the Americas

Abstract

Thirty years after the Conference on Population and Development in Cairo, the politics of reproduction is a more relevant topic than ever, particularly from a feminist governance perspective. The UN conference sought to eliminate population control policies and advance reproductive rights, while today, governments, NGOs, and organizations representing a diversity of ideologies seek to limit bodily autonomy by restricting access to abortion and birth control, seeking ways to bolster declining birth rates and regulate pregnancies. At the same time, feminist activists continue to resist such advances at every turn, mobilizing online, in the streets, via institutional channels such as political parties, and by collaborating with sister organizations in other countries. At this crossroads, a form of feminist governance that interrogates, analyzes, and challenges today’s intensified politics of reproduction is critical. This panel tackles various aspects of contemporary reproductive governance. While set in different empirical contexts, the assembled papers revolve around the actors and political structures that control women and gender-diverse bodies as well as those that resist such governance. Medical doctors are often at the center of abortion debates as they implement political decisions by translating them into the medical sphere. Payton Gannon and Danielle Pullan examine the prevalence of conscientious objection, which allows medical professionals who morally object to abortion to opt out of providing the procedure. Drawing on longitudinal data from Italy, they evaluate the effects of political, economic, and demographic factors on conscientious objection rates, helping us understand what determines the persistence of hindering access to safe and legal abortion services. Camilla Reuterswärd’s paper similarly zooms in on an actor with significant power over the regulation of reproduction: political parties. Turning to the question of how party system change alters the prospects of abortion policy reform, the paper advances a framework that focuses on the entrance of a new party and the potential for change, focusing empirically on subnational Mexico. Feminist activism challenges governments’ attempts to control female and gender-diverse bodies. In Peru, activists are currently involved in addressing both sides of population control strategies: advocating for legal abortion while at the same time demanding reparations for the forced sterilizations of Indigenous women in the 1990s. Phoebe Martin analyzes the visual politics of two Peruvian feminist movements arguing that addressing historical human rights violations is central to advancing contemporary abortion rights. Cora Fernandez Anderson, Anna Calasanti and Tamara Kay compare present-day abortion rights activism in the US and Latin America, arguing that the conflation of socio-cultural factors, surveillance and repressive structures, and the movements’ internal characteristics help to explain regional differences in activists’ tactics and behavior. Yet the politics of reproduction goes beyond legal limits on pregnancy termination. My Rafstedt’s paper conceptualizes the idea of gestational labour as a vehicle to analyse controversies and critiques in the public debate over the conditions for child-making in Norway. The Scandinavian welfare state, well-known for its investment in childcare, has recently been criticized for its state-provided conditions of gestational labour. Together, these contributions advance our understanding of present-day reproductive politics.

Title	Details
Party System Change and Abortion Policy: The case of MORENA in Mexico	View Paper Details
Between Law and Conscience: A Longitudinal Analysis of Italy’s Abortion Law	View Paper Details
Governing Reproduction: The Political Economy of Gestational Labor	View Paper Details
Fighting for abortion rights in the Americas: Civil disobedience and the vigilante state apparatus in comparative perspective	View Paper Details
Visual Politics Reproductive Rights Activism in Peru	View Paper Details