Abortion stigma, class and embodiment in neoliberal England

Abstract

Research on abortion stigma has given insight into how women experience abortion, tell stories about abortion, and make decisions about abortion. Stigma encompasses a range of feelings, experiences and discourses that can make having an abortion a negative experience or one that women might wish to conceal. This paper explores how abortion stigma is both classed and embodied, using the life stories of 15 middle-class women who have had abortions in England in 'neoliberal times'. It argues that the women's class position gave them access to various discursive resources with which to articulate their abortion stories, shaping their experiences and narration of stigma. It also draws attention to the ways in which both class and stigma are 'made through marking' on the body, and thus to the under-theorised embodied aspects of abortion stigma. In doing so, it argues that abortion stigma acts as a regulatory 'technology of the self' that is enabled by middleclass practices of self-control.

Safeguarding and teleconsultation for abortion

“…It also implies that safeguarding affects a substantial proportion of patients. Such inferences perpetuate harmful abortion stigma in attempting to "justify" why women need abortions, 16 rather than accepting that it is routine, essential healthcare. Abortion is routine healthcare in the UK (there were 207,384 abortions in England and Wales in 2019).…”

Abortion Attitudes Across Cultural Contexts

“…This secularization may play a role in shaping the increasing acceptance of abortion in this cultural context, where support for traumatic abortion has remained high since the 1960s and support for elective abortion has been on the rise from the 1960s to the 2010s (Clements & Field, 2018). Although public sentiment toward abortion in the United Kingdom is relatively supportive, in line with legislation that supports access to abortion in a variety of circumstances ( Abortion Act , 1967), women who have received abortion care in this context still report experiencing internalized stigma (e.g., feeling that they should suffer in their termination experiences; Love, 2021). Our findings demonstrate that this persistent stigma may be shaped by beliefs about supernatural punishment, which is consistent with The Church of England's public stance on abortion (Church of England, 2019) and research findings that show that UK believers, particularly those who rate religion as more important and who more frequently attend church services, are more likely to oppose abortion (Clements, 2014).…”

‘I Feel Like Some Kind of Namoona’: Examining Sterilisation in Women's Abortion Trajectories in India

“…Like Tasheen, Rajalakshmi's trajectory was shaped by sterilisation-except, in this case, it was the failure to be sterilised. Her abortion was a marker of her lack of sterilisation and her transgression of the established sterilisation norm; locating her body as "unruly" (Love, 2021) and requiring disciplining through the health system in order to meet set goals and priorities.…”