Abortion mobilities

Abstract

Abortion mobilities emerged within political geography and the reproductive mobilities scholarship to address extant theoretical and empirical gaps in these fields. This paper seeks to highlight and assess the abortion mobilities scholarship to date. Starting with a working definition of abortion mobilities, this paper argues for the relevance of abortion to political geography and outlines three key themes in political geography that abortion mobilities address: borders, states and anti-genderism, intersectional politics and reproductive justice, and activism and abortion pills.

The Chemical Geographies of Misoprostol: Spatializing Abortion Access from the Biochemical to the Global

“…Geographers have begun to examine how the mobility of abortion pills has fundamentally transformed the spatiality of abortion access. Rather than people moving from locations where they cannot access an abortion to one where they can ( Freeman 2017 ), the movement of pills to people can support them to end their pregnancies on their own terms ( Calkin 2020 ; Calkin and Freeman 2019 ; Calkin, Freeman and Moore 2022 ; Engle 2022 ; Freeman 2020 ). Mobility is central to understanding abortion they argue, because, “across scales, from the clinic to the nation-state, bodies, pills and knowledge are on the move in ways that reflect, reinforce and contest power relations” ( Calkin, Freeman and Moore 2022 , 1416).…”