Reproductive justice and abortion regulation in Germany, France, the Netherlands, Spain and Sweden

The right to abortion is a fiercely contested social issue and fundamental for gender equality and social justice. Some European states like Sweden or the Netherlands have a longstanding tradition of offering comparatively good access to abortions. Others like France and Spain have recently taken important steps towards ensuring abortion access. Meanwhile, Germany is discussing whether to reform its regulation of abortions. In this paper, I will use the concept of reproductive justice to analyse the current regulations on abortions in a comparative study of Sweden, the Netherlands, France, Spain, and Germany. This critical policy analysis from a reproductive justice perspective will demonstrate how reproductive justice as an analytical lens can help to identify strengths and shortcomings of extant regulations in all five states. This is particularly instructive in opening up and contextualising the subject of abortion rights in the wider context of reproduction policies. It further underlines the situation of particularly vulnerable groups and thus societal power structures as barriers to the realisation of human rights. The paper is structured as follows: In the first step, the concept of reproductive justice is introduced and discussed, its different uses as an analytical tool, guidance of practice and political vision are presented. In a short section on the methodological approach of the paper, I apply these principles to develop a framework for critical policy analysis and comparative study. In the second step, the topic of abortion rights will be situated in this broader understanding of reproduction and human rights and linked up with the recommendations on abortion regulation by the World Health Organisation. In the third step, I analyse the abortion policies of the five countries from the analytical framework developed in the first step of the paper. The concept of reproductive justice thus underpins the main argument of the paper: that the compared EU member states are currently failing to ensure reproductive justice for all of their citizens – albeit some more so than others.