Exploring the politics of refusal of self-managed abortion activism

Although, abortion regulation has been understood as fitting a larger pattern of control of female sexuality and reproduction (French, 1985), as a population control mechanism that is built around demographic goals rather than women’s rights and needs (Hartman, 2016), as a mechanism of social control of the adequate performance of gender (Berro Pizzarossa, 2019) and a legacy of colonialism (Chitnis and Wright, 2007), abortion activism has focused a great deal of its efforts on strategies for legal reform. However, the relatively new(ly visible) self-managed abortion movement proposes a feminist model of self and community care challenging the binary illegal=unsafe and refusing the models of care set by existing abortion laws. Simpson (2014, 2016) and McGranahan’s (2016) work on the concept of “refusal” have laid the foundation to enquire what it means when marginalized people–through individual or collective action–turn their backs on and refuse to accept the legitimacy of various authorities to grant rights, social services, recognition, and protection. Building on the literature on politics of refusal, this paper explores how that self-managed abortion activism (understood as that around self-sourcing pills, self-diagnosing and managing abortion process and post-abortion care outside formal health-care systems) is “generative and strategic” (McGranahan, 2016) and represents a deliberate move toward a different model care. In an effort to understand the “productive possibilities of refusal (Emejulu, 2019) this paper will explore how activists working on self-managed abortion “refuse” the colonial, patriarchal, imperial, gendered nature of abortion laws and dare to imagine and enact new subjectivities, new ways of being and new models of (reproductive) care. Using in depth qualitative interviews with activists from Latin America (+/- 15) working on service and/or information provision on self-managed abortion, this paper will explore how these activists articulate “refusal” in their work and “insist on other ways of being political together” (Simpson, 2016).