Criminalization of Women Accessing Abortion and Enforced Mobility within the European Union and the United Kingdom

Abstract

Usage of any items from the University of Cumbria's institutional repository 'Insight' must conform to the following fair usage guidelines.Any item and its associated metadata held in the University of Cumbria's institutional repository Insight (unless stated otherwise on the metadata record) may be copied, displayed or performed, and stored in line with the JISC fair dealing guidelines (available here) for educational and not-for-profit activities

Cross-country abortion travel to England and Wales: results from a cross-sectional survey exploring people’s experiences crossing borders to obtain care

“…Participants were asked to report their travel and accommodation costs separately, but costs are summed in our analysis. 2 For this paper, we analyze variables descriptively and present responses broken out by participants' legal environment. However, due to the relatively small sample of those who traveled from countries with more liberal laws, we do not present statistical tests to assess differences between the two groups.…”

“…Access to legal abortion remains fragmented across Europe. In countries with laws that permit abortion on broad social or economic grounds, including Germany, France, Italy, and Belgium, abortion access is constrained by gestational age limits, waiting periods, and a lack of trained and willing providers [1][2][3]. In Poland, Malta, and, until the 2019 implementation of the new abortion law, the Republic of Ireland the grounds for legal abortion have been severely limited, or abortion has been completely illegal [4].…”

Abortion mobilities

“…This line of thinking also suggests that the word ‘tourism’ erases the emotional and embodied nature of abortion travel with its connotations of pleasure and adventure‐seeking; as Freeman explains, abortion tourism is a problematic term that ‘erases the struggle, pain, shame and fear that travelling for abortions entails for many women’ (2017, p. 854). In lieu of describing abortion travel as tourism, scholars have proposed a number of alternative terms, just as in reproductive mobilities: exile (Kasstan & Crook, 2018; Singer, 2020), banishment (Kelly & Tuszynski, 2016), ‘sometimes‐migrating’ (Murray & Khan, 2020), enforced migration (Mecinska et al., 2020), and those travelling as ‘abortion refugees’ (Chambers et al., 2019). While these terms serve to challenge the notion that abortion travel could accurately be described as ‘tourism’, other geographers have found tourism to be a useful lens for examining abortion travel and mobilities.…”

“…Taking abortion in Poland as an example, Korolczuk argues that the anti‐gender movement relies on 'religious, nationalistic perspectives, [and] readily ignoring scientific data that counteracts their claims' (2021, p. 711). Indeed, religious institutions and groups opposed to abortion have had undue influence on abortion policy in countries with substantial Catholic or Evangelical populations in Europe and throughout the Americas (Mecinska et al., 2020; Morgan & Roberts, 2012). The right to abortion has also been contingent on the ‘territorial logics’ (Smith, 2012) of pronatalist and anti‐natalist governments (Coe, 2004; Kim, 2019).…”

“…As work by Bissonnette (2022), Gomez (2016), and Huddleston (2016) show, abortion mobilities in this region are not accessible for undocumented women and pregnant people. In European settings, particularly in Ireland, abortion geographers have likewise found disparities between regionally‐recognised rights to freedom of movement and the ability for certain groups to access abortion domestically or across borders (Gilmartin & White, 2011; Mecinska et al., 2020; Side, 2016). Side, for example, articulates that ‘for abortion‐seeking citizens, Ireland is the ideologically static domestic space from which they must travel and return, whereas for abortion‐seeking, migrant women, Ireland is the transnational destination to which they are moored’ (2016, p. 1793).…”