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In their papers, Sally Bjorklund and Hillary Grill investigate the negative impact of the reversal of Roe v.Wade on women's ability to choose when and how to manage their bodies and minds. Bjorklund offers an historical perspective, while Grill presents personal and clinical material to illustrate how misogyny and male dominance are reinforced through the intersection of externally imposed laws, socially transmitted beliefs, and the perpetuation of such beliefs through models of mind that implicitly devalue women—models such as psychoanalysis. Iinvite psychoanalysts to continue to interrogate misogyny while also asking how our clinical work might challenge and change psychoanalytic theorizing about female development, theorizing that continues to pathologize women and valorize male dominance. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The papers of Beck and Snider (this issue) grapple with the place of abortion in our psychoanalytic thought and practice, locating abortion within the larger cultural and political world. At the heart of much of the difficulty surrounding a thoughtful consideration of abortion is the accompanying dissociative pressure arising from the binaries of life and death, of maternal versus fetal well-being, and the confounding of socio-cultural and personal decision making. I offer an intergenerational lens juxtaposing the polarized present with the open and accessible abortion landscape of the late 1970s. In both eras, examples are discussed where the political and cultural zeitgeist exerts dissociative pressure on patient and therapist alike, leaving little room for psychoanalytic exploration. The role of both partners in any conception is also discussed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

"Abortion Care is Health Care" by Barbara Baird provides a historical account of abortion services in Australia from the 1990s to the 2020s. The book argues that although abortion has been effectively pro-choice for decades, access to abortion services remains uneven and inequitable. Baird highlights that the majority of abortion services are provided by private clinics, resulting in limited access for marginalized and disadvantaged women. The book is meticulously researched and provides comprehensive information on providers, laws, regulations, and events in each Australian state and territory. However, it may be more suitable for scholars than a general audience. [Extracted from the article]

These two dimensions of abortion-related stigma continue to be evident in major political and legal shifts that negatively impact abortion access. This international collection of papers from contexts with variable social and legal restrictions on abortion, offers progressive insights into community activism, abortion-related healthcare, and community attitudes, including how women perceive abortion and value abortion care. Debates about human rights, the sanctity of life and the rights of the unborn continue to play out internationally, often placing women seeking abortion in the crosshairs of politicians, faith leaders, community members and others who consider abortion a moral ill rather than a health need. [Extracted from the article]

Medication abortion has been established globally as safe and effective. This modality has increased accessibility and the opportunity to centre individual autonomy at the heart of abortion care, by facilitating self-managed abortion. Previous research has shown how self-managed abortion is beneficial in myriad settings ranging from problematic to (relatively) unproblematic contexts of access. In this paper we explore the relationship between self-management and sources of support (including health professionals, family, and friends); as well as considering issues of reproductive control and autonomy. Drawing on qualitative, experience-centred interviews, we utilise the concept of social connectedness to examine how supported self-managed abortion was experienced in the United Kingdom during the COVID-19 pandemic. Overall, self-management was welcomed, with participants speaking positively about managing their own abortion at home. However, a sense of connectedness was crucial in helping participants deal with difficult experiences; and functioned to support individual autonomy in self-care. This paper is the first to examine factors of connection, support, and isolation, as experienced by those undergoing self-managed abortion in the UK in detail. Our research suggests a continued need to advocate for high quality support for self-managed abortion, as well as for choice of abortion method, to support patient-centered care. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

For 49 years, the right to abortion was taken for granted—inhaled by every girl, every woman—by all people assigned female at birth in the United States. This right no longer exists. In 2022, with the Dobbs v. Jackson decision, the Supreme Court removed federal protection for the legal right to abortion and therefore women's agency over their bodies. This paper will contextualize abortion as part of a continuum that encompasses gender, motherhood and the meaning of reproduction and reproductive rights as sociocultural and intrapsychic phenomena. The expectation that mature female-bodied people are child-desiring women persists and is not conceptualized as optional. It is the original choice women do not have. The next choice women no longer have, if they become pregnant, is whether or not to continue a pregnancy. The Dobbs decision means the cultural reinstatement of female de-sexualization, along with the suffocating and silencing of agency—a negation of women's voices, desire, power and subjectivity—a recipe for psychological destabilization. Personal and clinical material will illustrate these points. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper contextualizes the Dobbs v. Jackson decision within the history of how children have been used, literally and symbolically, as commodities, to serve political, economic and religious goals. Also examined are attitudes toward women and moral decision-making, and motives behind state interference in reproductive choice. Focus is placed on the promotion of adoption, by some anti-abortionactivists, as the moral alternative to abortion. The recent activities of some evangelical Christian groups to deploy adoption as away to increase their numbers, as well as the Spanish government's history of stealing babies from anti-governmentmothers, and the history in the U.S.of the use of sterilization as apurported means of reducing poverty, are offered as evidence. Suggestions are made for how psychoanalysis might expand theory to include the role of the social unconscious, particularly in understanding the development of female subjectivity and awoman's capacity to make moral/ethical choices for herself. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Conscientious objection to provide abortion has been enshrined in laws and policies globally. Insufficient attention has been paid to the direct and indirect ways in which conscientious objection compromises women's access to a lawful abortion. Using a systematic search strategy, this narrative literature review synthesises the literature exploring conscientious objection's impact on women's access to abortion in a range of countries. This narrative literature review builds on an extensive literature review published by Chavkin et al. (2013. Conscientious objection and refusal to provide reproductive healthcare: A white paper examining prevalence, health consequences, and policy responses. International Journal of Gynecology & Obstetrics, 123, S41–S56. https://doi.org/10.1016/S0020-7292(13)60002-8). Searches were undertaken on the Medline (Ovid), Global Health, CINAHL, Scopus and Science Direct databases. Thirty six papers were included for thematic analysis. Conscientious objection to abortion was found to impact women's access to abortion at three main levels: the practitioner level, the healthcare system level and the sociocultural environment level. Conscientious objection was found to impact access directly through attempts by health professionals to restrict access, and indirectly by exacerbating pre-existing barriers to access. Further research is required to better quantify the extent to which this impacts women and whether interventions are effective in reducing the barriers that conscientious objection creates and exacerbates. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Reproductive rights have faced uncertainty following a succession of court decisions since 2021, particularly following the decision in Dobbs v. Jackson Woman's Health. This article explores the response from mobile applications dubbed "period trackers" or "menstruapps," which allow individuals to track their menstrual cycles on mobile devices. Following the Dobbs decision and subsequent efforts by states to criminalize abortion, there were many voices concerned about the data these apps collect. This paper analyzes the privacy policies from over 30 apps. Specifically, focusing on how these apps changed their language, or not, during a period when reproductive rights were under increased threat. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper explores post-abortion experience and identifies key themes that may arise while working with individuals who have had an abortion. This paper aims to revisit and deconstruct the issue of abortion and place it in the sociopolitical context from which it arises. The research included draws from multiple disciplines including art history, the politics of inclusivity and the interconnections between identity, oppression and privilege, as a way to understand the intricacy of one's experience of abortion and approaches the topic through an intersectional feminist lens. The paper explores art therapy as a powerful approach to depict loss, and questions how we can create a safe therapeutic space for our clients in order to allow them to further explore their post-abortion experience. Two key themes were explored; 'self and body as a compass' and 'working with the "invisible loss" and recreating the narrative; Art therapy approach'. The first theme touches on the sociopolitical ideas imprinted on the body and how a therapeutic space may allow an individual to further explore the memories associated with their experience. The second theme further looks into how art therapy can be a powerful approach for the exploration of themes that emerge post-abortion, as well as the importance of being able to encourage agency in our client to choose their own way of using the therapeutic space. Finally, I have included my own use of creating and reviewing artwork as a form of self-reflexivity. This paper explores the post-abortion experience and identifies two key themes that may emerge while working with individuals who have had an abortion. The first theme is; 'self and body as a compass' and the second; 'working with the "invisible loss" and recreating the narrative; Art therapy approach'. I have drawn from my own art-making process in response to the topic and a contemporary artist's personal body of work, called Tony Gum, in order to navigate the themes explored in this paper. This paper will hopefully help to start conversations around how we can create a safe therapeutic space for our clients and how we can support them in the way they want to use the therapeutic space to further explore their experience. Research recommendations are also discussed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Browning and Veit note how, since the presence of sentience in mammals, birds and cephalopods received official scientific recognition in the 2012 I Cambridge Declaration on Consciousness i , animal sentience has been legally recognized in the European Union, UK, New Zealand and parts of Australia. The final paper by Hendricks and Seybold criticizes the still extant practice of unauthorized pelvic examinations (UPEs) on unconscious female patients by medical students as part of their training. In their paper, they 'analyze this shift towards recognition of sentience in the regulation and practice in the treatment of laboratory animals and its effects on animal welfare and use'. [Extracted from the article]

The 2022 Supreme Court decision Jackson v Dobbs overturned Roe v. Wade, which provided federal protection to reproductive rights. The Dobbs decision catalyzed reactions from across the American landscape. This is especially true in different segments of American religious thought. One interesting phenomenon increasingly seen in minority religious groups is the bifurcation of intrareligious principles, whereby the religious permissibility of abortion and, to a larger extent, reproductive rights are presented in a binary fashion, facilitating internal conflict and tension within religious groups. One such example is the religious discourse ubiquitous in both the theological and legal realm in the American-Muslim community. The conservative American-Muslim position (i.e., high constraints on abortion) that claims to stem from traditional authority tends to oppose orthodox scholarly consensus, which in fact, aligns more with liberal viewpoints (i.e., low constraints on abortion). How can one make sense of this misalignment? The following paper will provide the legal and theological framework for this discussion, with an introduction to the concept of "Normative Communal Conservatism", which seeks to explain this seemingly contradictory perspective. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The subtitle to the conference upon which this journal issue is based invited us to 'follow Crowter'. This paper does so primarily by following the person and only thereby attends to the legal judgment. In particular, it will attend to her comment that When mum told me about the discrimination against babies like me in the womb, I felt like a knife had been put into my heart. It made me feel less valued than other people. The argument is that (I) there are strong reasons for such an approach from the field of theological ethics and that this is valuable for pastoral theology and for bioethics. With this case made, the argument proceeds (II) by following and building on three elements of Heidi Crowter's words concerning (a) the knife (b) the heart and (c) the person. The argument concludes (III) with theological reflection and deliberation regarding institutions, practices and actions which will make for 'ethical society', principally focussed on ecclesial life. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The right to informed consent (IC), as established in the Supreme Court judgment in Montgomery v Lanarkshire Health Board [2015] UKSC 11, I claim involves a 'journey of love' between clinicians and patients. The latter entails a process of dialogue and support between the parties, concerning disclosure of risks, benefits and alternatives to medical treatment(s). In this paper, I first claim that IC, in the light of the spirit of Montgomery, is predicated upon two pillars, namely patients' autonomy and medical partnership. I will then explore a case study: the case of legal abortion in England and Wales. Regarding this case, the progressive reduction of medical involvement has meant that little opportunity has been provided for this 'journey' to be unpacked in a medical context. I will ultimately claim that more needs to be done to safeguard IC as a 'journey of love' through valuing both patients' autonomy and medical partnership. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

While there is an ample body of literature in the anthropology of moralities there is a surprising dearth of research on conscience per se. In Malta over the last ten years there has been a proliferation of a public discourse of ‘conscience’ – its affordances, freedoms and its legal safeguards. This has been the result of debates over reforms leading to the liberalization of sexual and family life, including most recently debates over the legalization of abortion. While the language of conscience in various human rights instruments claims a universal character its meanings, inflections and significance can vary in important ways. There is a blurred boundary between conscience and religion. This paper examines the ways in which conscience is deployed and the significance of the appeals to a national conscience in a European confessional state. It looks at the specific meanings of conscience in Malta and a brief lexical and political history It then moves on to look at the ways objections of conscience are framed in contemporary Malta in light of theological debates and their ramifications in Catholic Malta. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Research documents how abortion can be emotionally difficult and stigmatising, but generally has not considered whether and how involvement in abortion may be a source of positive emotions, including pleasure, belonging and even joy. The absence of explorations that start from the possibility of abortion pleasure and joy represents an epistemic foreclosure. Moreover, it highlights how social science literature has tended to emphasise the negative aspects of abortion care in ways that produce or amplify normative negative associations. In this paper, we investigate the positive emotions, pleasure and joy of abortion involvement by drawing on interviews conducted in 2019 with 28 abortion accompaniers in Argentina, Chile, and Ecuador about their experiences accompanying abortions after 17 weeks' gestation. Abortion accompaniment is a response to unsafe and/or inaccessible abortion whereby volunteer activists guide abortion seekers through a medication abortion. Interviewees described how the practice of accompaniment generated positive emotions by building a feminist community, shared intimacy among women, and witnessing aborting people claim their strength. Importantly, these positive emotional experiences of involvement with abortion were not distinct from the broader marginalisation of abortion but were, instead, rooted in its marginalisation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

AbstractUnsafe abortions contribute significantly to maternal mortality and morbidity in Ghana. To reduce this, in 1982 abortion laws in Ghana underwent reform to broaden the conditions under which abortion is accessed. Although, evidence in other contexts highlights the contribution of violence to women’s experience of unwanted pregnancy and abortion, such evidence is limited within the Ghanaian abortion literature. This study aims to fill that gap. Informed by phenomenology, interviews were conducted with 10 women who had experienced various forms of violence leading to unwanted pregnancy and unsafe abortions. Participants were recruited between June 2017 and March 2018 in the Ashanti region of Ghana where they sought hospital care for unsafe abortion related complications. Participants mentioned intimate partners as the main perpetrators of violence. Financial challenges were also identified as important in increasing women’s vulnerability to violence. Verbal abuse from health workers contributed to denying women access to safe abortion. This paper advances dialogue about the ways in which women’s experience of violence from intimate/non-intimate partners and healthcare workers impacts their overall abortion experience. It advocates the empowerment of women to enable them to leave violent relationships, and the retraining of health workers to enable them to adopt respectful and empathetic care practices. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Until 2018, abortion in the Republic of Ireland was banned in almost all circumstances under one of the most restrictive legal regimes in Europe. The main solution for Irish women and pregnant people seeking abortion services had been to pursue care abroad, typically in clinics in England. In this paper we focus on the hardships of waiting for abortion care experienced by Irish residents leading up to their travel for appointments in England in 2017 and 2018. Based on in-depth interviews with 53 Irish women collected at three British Pregnancy Advisory Services (BPAS) clinics in England we analyse women's experiences as they navigated an 'environment of secrecy' in Ireland. This included making specific secrecy efforts when navigating travel arrangements, conversations, movement, health records, and the travel itself. Despite the expansion of abortion access in Ireland in 2018, the need to travel abroad continues for many women. We argue that the continued need for secrecy when women have to travel abroad for care perpetuates this important phenomenon's invisibility. This argument also applies to other countries where abortion access is restricted, and women are forced to travel for care. We also caution against the presumption that all Irish residents are able to travel internationally for healthcare. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abortion is a common and safe gynaecological procedure. Yet in film and television it is disproportionately represented as risky, violent, requiring hospitalisation, and affecting young, white, wealthy women. This reinforces stigma, fear and misunderstanding surrounding the procedure. While the majority of television storylines still inaccurately portray abortion, a small minority are directly showing abortion and presenting it as a positive decision. This paper analyses four such storylines in the television shows Sex Education, Shrill, GLOW and Euphoria, as well as media discourse around these plotlines, to understand how contemporary, 'feminist' television shows are representing abortion. The paper argues that contemporary television is increasingly representing abortion in an empathetic way that upholds women's choice to access the procedure, but that these portrayals can be read as post-feminist. Individual choice and empowerment are prioritised in these shows at the expense of showing the complex and unequal power structures that affect how women make reproductive choices. 'Feminist' television still prioritises the abortion storylines of young, white women who face no obstacles to abortion access and so the realities of abortion are still not fully represented on screen. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In a 2018 referendum, the Irish electorate voted in favour of repealing Ireland's quasi-total legal ban on abortion. The referendum campaign saw important public discussions regarding gender roles in twenty-first century Ireland. While the constitutional ban on abortion was condemned by abortion rights advocates for marginalising women's agency, the legislation which replaced it has not escaped criticism either. Therefore, questions surrounding the conceptualisation of women's agency in the 2018 referendum are still relevant today. Adopting a multimodal critical discourse analysis approach, this paper analyses signage from the weeks before the vote to examine the discursive construction of women's agency in the linguistic landscape of the referendum campaign. I argue that many mainstream campaign organisations – including those arguing for liberalisation of abortion laws – were complicit in the discursive diminishment of women's agency, suggesting that the campaign did not necessarily challenge prevailing ideologies of gender and agency. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Ireland's Citizens' Assembly (CA) of 2016–18 was tasked with making recommendations on abortion. This paper shows that from the outset its members were in large part in favour of the liberalisation of abortion (though a fair proportion were undecided), that over the course of its deliberations the CA as a whole moved in a more liberal direction on the issue, but that its position was largely reflected in the subsequent referendum vote by the population as a whole. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The abortion road trip is a narrative device that has emerged in the last decade whereby the central plot of the story is the journey taken in search of an abortion. In this paper we analyze two young adult novels (Girls on the Verge and Unpregnant) and two films (Grandma and Never Rarely Sometimes Always) that follow adolescent girls traveling for abortions in the contemporary United States. Through the analysis of these four narratives, we argue that representations of the abortion road trip are novel for their focus on the barriers and politics of abortion access in the United States. While the representations do prioritize certain barriers over others, they mark an important shift in abortion discourse in popular culture. Instead of the 'drama' of the plot being the decision to have an abortion, it is increasingly other socio-politico-legal issues such as the lack of abortion clinics, the distance required to travel, legal rights for adolescents, the cost of the procedure, and the opinions of family and friends that take center stage. The focus on these structural, political barriers can help to educate audiences about the realities of abortion access in the US and move abortion discourse beyond the individual. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In 2020, the New Zealand (NZ) Parliament voted to decriminalise abortion. Although NZ's abortion law formally opposes sex selective abortions, there is considerable complexity in the gender politics of 'choice' and 'agency' in multi-ethnic societies, and interpretations of reproductive rights for ethnic minority women and for the girl child, respectively. This paper explores these complexities through the perspectives of reproductive and maternity care practitioners who are situated at the interface of legal systems, health service provision, and delivery of culturally sensitive care. Thirteen practitioners were interviewed as part of this study. The analysis highlights strains in framings of 'reproductive choice' (underpinned by western liberal notions of rights) and 'gender equality' (abortion rights that acknowledge the complexity of cultural son-preference) for ethnic minority women. These tensions are played out in three aspects of the post-reform landscape: (a) everyday practice and accountability; (b) consumerism and choice; (c) custodianship and gender rights. The findings point to the limitations in operationalising choices for ethnic women in health systems wherein trust deficit prevails, and cultural dynamics render complex responses to abortion. They also highlight reconfigurations of client-expert relationships that may have implications for practitioners' abilities to advocate for ethnic women's rights against cultural influences. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

As the climate crisis escalates, the political discourse of the United States has doubled down to focus not on the environment at large, but on that of the uterus. This paper argues that the fetal body is operating as a magical fetish object upon which to displace growing annihilation anxieties while attempting to colonize the future. As the fetus embodies projected climate vulnerability, policing the fantasized purity of the uterus becomes a displaced antidote to the horrors of environmental destruction. Integrating psychoanalysis with concepts from anti-Blackness and Indigenous theories, I contend that this fetal fetish functions as a colonizing temporal system of affect regulation used to buttress an anxious and violently defensive white, cisgender, able-bodied, heteromasculinity. Cloaked in the pretext of fetal protectionism, racially and economically stratified reproductive violence is a literal scorched Earth policy fortifying white, heteropatriarchal "human" exceptionalism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Given the politicization of abortion, professionals working in U.S. health departments (HDs) may not be receptive to communications about abortion, despite often regulating abortion facilities. This paper reports results of a randomized, prospective, observational study to test the effects of e-mail language when disseminating evidence on abortion to HD professionals. Our sample was 302 HD employees who oversee healthcare facilities inspection/regulation in all 50 U.S. state HDs, clustered by HD and randomized into two study groups. In November–December 2019, we sent biweekly e-mails containing links to a website summarizing evidence on abortion facility regulation. E-mails/headers sent to one group emphasized public health values and did not include the word abortion; e-mails/headers to the other group used the word abortion. Primary outcome measures were e-mail open rates and click-through rates. Among 221 participants to whom e-mails were deliverable, the overall open rate was 36%. Open rate was 25% for PH values and 46% for abortion groups (p <.05). Effects were moderated by state abortion policy environment: in both supportive and restrictive environments, participants in the abortion messaging group were statistically more likely to open e-mails than those in the PH values group. There was no difference between groups in states with middle-ground abortion policy environments. Among participants opening at least one e-mail, 19% clicked through to the website, with no significant difference by group. This study demonstrates that repeated targeted e-mail campaigns can reach HD professionals with research summaries. Concerns that communications to HDs should avoid the word abortion are unsupported. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper provides a recent legal case which calls into discussion the women’s safe access to voluntary termination of pregnancy (VTP) after the first 90 days. On 15 January 2021, the Italian Supreme Court sentenced a physician to damage compensation because he did not correctly inform the patient, in her 22nd week of pregnancy, about the risks to the fetus relating to an infection from cytomegalovirus (CMV). The option for VTP was not offered since, at the time of the woman’s request, medical investigations did not show the evidence of fetal malformations, neither there were concrete risks for the life of the mother, as Italian law requires. The baby was born with severe brain injuries. The case is noteworthy because it offers a new precedent to extend legal requirements for late VTP. The impact of this decision must be tested in the clinical practice. Further studies are necessary to evaluate possible law amendments extending access conditions for this practice and new policies promoting the strengthening of informative and assistance procedures, including psychological help, to the pregnant woman are needed, as well. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

AbstractAfter experiencing my own miscarriage, I was told by a pro-life advocate that the miscarriage should be easy for me to “get over” because, as a pro-choice advocate, I didn’t regard embryos or fetuses as persons. While such a comment can be attributed to ignorance, it is true that the pro-choice community in general has been reluctant to acknowledge grief after pregnancy loss, whether through miscarriage, stillbirth, or abortion. In this paper, I argue that it is imperative that abortion rights advocates acknowledge the ambivalence and grief that can follow abortions and that they help create feminist, women-centered ways of addressing and alleviating any negative post-abortion feelings. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The concept of personhood has been central to bioethics debates about abortion, the treatment of patients in a vegetative or minimally conscious states, as well as patients with advanced dementia. More recently, the concept has been employed to think about new questions related to human-brain organoids, artificial intelligence, uploaded minds, human-animal chimeras, and human embryos, to name a few. A common move has been to ask what these entities have in common with persons (in the normative sense), and then draw conclusions about what we do (or do not) owe them. This paper argues that at best the concept of "personhood" is unhelpful to much of bioethics today and at worst it is harmful and pernicious. I suggest that we (bioethicists) stop using the concept of personhood and instead ask normative questions more directly (e.g., how ought we to treat this being and why?) and use other philosophical concepts (e.g., interests, sentience, recognition respect) to help us answer them. It is time for bioethics to end talk about personhood. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Like many areas of public health, sexual and reproductive health is concerned with politically contentious matters such as abortion and LGBT+ rights. Global setbacks at the hands of the far right highlight the extent to which the rights and practices underpinning sexual and reproductive health are politically mediated. Yet the political is often occluded in mainstream sexual and reproductive health responses. In this paper, I consider the recent travails of sexual and reproductive health in order to critique technocratic knowledge forms that dominate both sexual and reproductive health and public health responses. Exploring sexual and reproductive health responses across time and space, I identify alternative knowledge forms and approaches relevant to public health. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The global political trend of restricting reproductive rights produces fragmented landscapes and embodied experiences for women navigating shifting terrain. This raises questions concerning the conceptualisation of reproductive citizenship. We develop a theoretical framework inspired by the concept of embodied citizenship with which we analyse the sensing, management and negotiation of reproductive citizenship. We find that women relationally, bodily and geographically (re)negotiate their reproductive citizenship when considering and securing access to abortion. In the context of the Faroe Islands, we highlight the emotional tension and ambivalence in women's narratives as expressions of the constrained reproductive citizenship constructions and the interrelational experiences of threatened belonging in society. This analytical framework may prove useful for researchers wishing to examine the turbulent global reproductive landscape, and the geographic, bodily and relational means through which women seeking care negotiate their citizenship. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The difficulty in maintaining the balance between oxides and antioxidants causes a phenomenon named oxidative stress. Oxidative stress often leads to tissue damage and participates in the pathogenesis of a series of diseases. Decidua provides the 'soil' for embryo implantation, and the normal decidualization shows the characteristics of strong antioxidation. Once the mechanism of antioxidant stress goes awry, it will lead to a series of pregnancy-related diseases. In recent years, more and more studies have shown that oxidative stress is involved in pregnancy-related diseases caused by abnormal decidualization of the endometrium. In order to have a more comprehensive understanding of the role of oxidative stress in decidual defect diseases, this paper reviews the common decidual defect diseases in conjunction with relevant regulatory molecules, in order to arouse thinking about the importance of oxidative stress, and to provide more theoretical basis for the aetiology of decidual defects. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abortion pill reversal (APR) treatment aims to halt an initiated medical abortion, wherein a pregnant woman takes progesterone after having taken the first of the two consecutive abortion pills, typically because she has changed her mind and no longer wants to abort the pregnancy. It is a controversial intervention, generally supported by those identifying as pro-life and opposed by those identifying as pro-choice. This paper examines whether, in principle, those identifying with the pro-choice view should support APR. We firstly examine the commitments of the pro-choice stance. We then briefly outline the evidence supporting the APR. Following this, we discuss potential consequences of APR on women's mental health and its safety. We conclude that those espousing the pro-choice standpoint should be, in principle, committed to supporting the availability of APR, while recognising that data on its efficacy may be difficult to obtain. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Recent demographic analysis of sex ratios at birth in the UK has signaled the issue of "missing girls" in British Asian minority populations. This paper juxtaposes the processes of reproductive regulation set in motion by this new demographic knowledge of son preference, with lived experiences of gender equality and family-making practices. Ethnographic research conducted with British Pakistani, Indian, and Bangladeshi families reveal diverse mechanisms of family decision-making that add to and nuance the prevailing statistics. We use the lens of "gender equality" and vernacular framings of sex-selective abortion to advance conceptual understandings of son preference as increasingly disconnected from selective reproduction, at the same time as selective reproduction is connected with the governance of ethnic minority identity and reproduction. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Will experience with direct democracy influence men's and women's political beliefs differently? Despite the closed gender gap in voter turnout, women remain less interested in politics and participate less frequently in non-voting activities than men. Scholars find women's lower sense of internal political efficacy as the origins of these gender gaps. In this paper, I examine whether the experience of direct participation in political decision-making alters women's feelings of internal political efficacy differently from it does men's. Building on the insights from the literature on the gendered psychological traits, I theorize that voting in referendums will promote men's internal political efficacy but not women's, because of women's greater susceptibility to the psychological costs of participation in referendums. Using an original panel survey conducted shortly before and after the 2018 abortion referendum in Ireland, I demonstrate the presence of the gendered effect in voting in referendums: While men reported increased internal political efficacy after voting in the referendum, women did not experience any meaningful change, even though the issue magnified women's psychological engagement with the vote. My findings suggest that differences in psychological dispositions between men and women create gendered reactions to citizen experience in the political arena. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper looks at three televised examples of pregnant women grappling with prenatal testing. In these stories, prenatal testing for disability is increasingly being framed as a requirement of responsible motherhood, and termination of pregnancies with diagnoses of disability shown as the logical choice. Disability is frequently depicted to be an anxiety-inducing or disappointing outcome. Previous research has shown televised depictions of pregnancy to be influential; the narratives illustrated here reinforce the discourse that disability is a burden for potential parents and entrench the view that fetal value is defined by "health," which is constructed in binary opposition with disability. Ultimately, these media depictions can have far-reaching effects in terms of pregnant people's feelings about the need to use prenatal testing, their diagnoses, and their decisions regarding both testing and termination. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article investigates how issues related to abortion have been portrayed in American television from 2005 to 2021 through a feminist analysis of the melodramatic series Grey's Anatomy. Using a comparative analysis between two female characters facing accidental pregnancies, this work examines how they are portrayed when pondering over the possibility of terminating their pregnancies and investigates male behavior regarding women's decisions. In addition, it scrutinizes how shifts in contemporary feminism might have influenced these depictions. Drawing from an interdisciplinary approach on feminist television scholarship, this paper encompasses theoretical works related to motherhood, abortion, postfeminism, and popular feminism. It also investigates how the polysemic meaning intertwines patriarchal and feminist readings in a mass-culture product, and how the transition from postfeminism to popular feminism into mainstream texts has affected the display of women's bodily autonomy by depicting these plots in a less punitive way towards women than before. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The disability ground in the law can be thought to send a negative message about disabled people on the basis that disability is singled out as a reason for abortion, and also that abortion for this reason is allowed until birth. Footnotes 1 Many of the presentations from this conference are available to view here: 'Prenatal Testing, Disability, and the Ethical Society: Reflections Following I Crowter i ' at https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLCn48d2ExkzLBXad30RfiIdeGMEI7covI 2 I R (Crowter) v Secretary of State for Health and Social Care i [2022] 1 WLR 2513. Both Heidi Crowter and Aidan Lea-Wilson have Down syndrome, although the issues raised in the case, and in the conference, relate to disability more broadly. This special issue of I The New Bioethics i follows on from a conference that took place at St Stephen's House, University of Oxford, in March 2022, on 'Prenatal Testing, Disability, and the Ethical Society: Reflections Following I Crowter i '.[1] The conference title refers to an important decision from the High Court, I R (Crowter) v Secretary of State for Health and Social Care i .[2] In this case, the claimants challenged the law on abortion on the grounds of disability under the Abortion Act 1967, and their arguments raised a number of difficult ethical questions about prenatal testing, disability, and what kind of society we wish to have - and what is needed for it to be an "ethical society". [Extracted from the article]

Poland has one of the strictest abortion laws in Europe, and anti-abortion discourse shapes the debate and social attitudes towards the issue. The paper aims to reconstruct the way in which this discourse, as exemplified in the Polish right-wing press, constructs negative views about abortion and to identify the legitimation mechanisms it employs to sustain its interpretations. Based on our findings, resulting from a content analysis of articles from two right-wing weekly magazines, we distinguish three interrelated frames organising Polish anti-abortion discourse, centred on 'defending the unborn', 'protecting women', and 'preserving culture and nation'. While the first two have occurred in the liberal contexts of Anglophone countries, with one replacing the other, in Polish anti-abortion discourse they co-exist. The construction of abortion as a threat to culture and nation is specific to Poland. We argue that by blending together community-related and individualistic arguments, Polish anti-abortion discourse adapts to wider societal changes observable in the country, thereby sustaining its power to define debate. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abortion opponents are sometimes accused of having inconsistent beliefs, actions, and/or priorities. If they were consistent, they would regard spontaneous abortions to be a greater moral tragedy, or they would adopt more frozen in vitro fertilization embryos, or they would support more robust social welfare programmes for children and single parents, or so on and so forth. Nicholas Colgrove, Bruce Blackshaw, and Daniel Rodger have recently argued that such inconsistency arguments 'fail en masse.' They propose three main objections: The Diversity Objection, The Other Beliefs Objection, and The Other Actions Objection. This paper argues that they are incorrect. First, Colgrove et al.'s objections rely on misrepresentations of inconsistency arguments, their structure and the extent to which their proponents have addressed counterarguments to them. Second, none of their objections show that these arguments fail as a whole. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper I analyse the written testimonies submitted by pro-choice Irish women to the government in advance of the Referendum to Repeal the Eighth Amendment in May 2018. These testimonies are all in favour of legal reform to allow abortion access. However, the women's narratives are far from homogeneous in how they view abortion and how they present their abortion histories. Some offer a categorically pro-choice position with unapologetic calls for the liberatory potential of abortion in society to be recognized. Others, however, are far more cautious, far more conciliatory. Here, drawing on a powerful set of normative expectations around femininity, sexuality, class and family, such pro-choice women invoke a particular cultural meaning of abortion that, paradoxically perhaps, calls for the end to prohibitions on abortion while simultaneously provoking certain anti-abortion sentiments in detailing their individual abortion histories. I also suggest that adopting a defensive, almost apologetic endorsement of abortion may have significant anti-abortion side-effects in restricting future access to reproductive rights. Instead, what is called for, from a pro-choice advocacy perspective, is developing a culture of outspokenness around abortion to counter further anti-abortion inroads into women's reproductive lives. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Public choice literature divides the rationality of voting between instrumental and expressive. In this paper, we take the Vermont legislature in passing the H. 57 bill as a case to explain some of the determinants of expressive voting empirically. The H.57 bill declares that no government entity can interfere with, or restrict, a consenting individual's right to abortion care across the entire gestation period. However, the bill has not changed the previously status quo of the state towards abortion rights. Thus, it creates a situation in which we can analyze the legislator's voting behavior through the lens of an expressive voting framework. We utilize a high dimensional dataset and post-double-selection LASSO method to explain the channels that influence the expressive voting on the H. 57 bill. We web scrape the lower and upper chamber voting data on H.57 bill and use the 2017 American Community Survey 5-year estimates to retrieve 89 different socioeconomic, housing, and demographic characteristics of State Legislative Districts. Our results suggest channels of poverty, gender, and population diversity are some crucial mechanisms. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The aim of this article is to provide a fuller picture of the organized abortions on Japanese female repatriates that took place within the repatriate medical relief under occupation of the GHQ. It also analyzes how the government carried out illegal abortions prior to the de facto legalization of abortion by the Eugenic Protection Law of 1948. This article suggests that the government justified abortions for societal reasons, such as rape, or for eugenic reasons, which were illegal at the time, by broadening the interpretation of caring for the mother's health and treating societal and eugenic reasons as medical reasons. In so doing, the paper examines the issues of historical continuity and discontinuity in Japan's modern history. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Internet-mediated focus groups (FGs) have become a feature of qualitative research over the last decade; however, their use within social sciences has been adopted at a slower pace than other disciplines. This paper considers the advantages and disadvantages of internet-mediated FGs and reflects on their use for researching culturally sensitive issues. It reports on an innovative study, which utilised text-based asynchronous internet-mediated FGs to explore attitudes to abortion, and abortion as a workplace issue. The authors identify three key elements of text-based asynchronous online FGs as particularly helpful in researching culturally sensitive issues – safety, time and pace. The authors demonstrate how these elements, integral to the actual process, contributed to 'opinion change/evolution' and challenged processes of stigmatisation centred on over-simplification, misinformation as to the incidence of a culturally sensitive issue in a population, and discrimination. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines the treatment of unplanned pregnancies as strategic plot-points within two recent and seemingly disparate works of Hindi cinema—Kabir Singh and Thappad. Commercial Hindi films have begun to depict a variety of female characters. However, the positioning of motherhood as the undisputed outcome of every pregnancy curiously remains an unshakeable norm. By juxtaposing the thematic use of pregnancy in a misogynistic film and a progressive one, I explore the persistent appeal of chastity and motherhood as the hallmarks of desirable Hindi film heroines. I examine the undisputed and implicit acceptance of unintended pregnancies within these films as an unwitting conciliation with patriarchal anxieties. I argue for the need to transcend the rhetoric of "choice" in shaping the popular imagination on women's empowerment. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In English law, the conventional view is that human personhood is produced by live birth, kinship is produced by relations between persons, and corpses are produced on the death of persons, which are then buried or cremated. Beings produced by human pregnancy which do not fit these discursive categories are classified as 'pregnancy remains', have no personhood or kinship, and their disposal is regulated as human tissue. However, this paper argues that the governance of the dead, born, foetal body in England, in fact, produces forms of foetal personhood, through the regulation of the material dead bodies of foetuses and babies. Furthermore, the assignment of responsibility for disposal and post-mortem decisions to kin of the dead foetal being also produces a relational form of foetal personhood. The examination of second-trimester pregnancy loss in England through fieldwork with women who have experienced foetal death, premature labour, and termination for foetal anomaly before 24 weeks' gestation reveals how governance of the dead, born, foetal body in England is incoherent.It also illustrates the effects of this incoherence on parental choices about the range of actions available after pregnancy loss in relation to the material body of the foetal being or baby. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The liberalization of the Indian economy in the 1990s led to an unprecedented increase in the availability of prenatal ultrasound technology. In this paper, we analyze the differential spread of ultrasound in India at the state level over a ten-year period (1999 to 2008) and the consequences for the prevalence of sex-selective abortion. Omitting the Southern Indian states, which had the fastest increase in ultrasound use and little sex selection, we find that higher levels of ultrasound use within a state are positively associated with the probability that a child is born male. This increased likelihood of having a male child is only found for children with no older brothers, i.e. births most likely to be affected by sex selection. The positive relationship between state-level ultrasound use and having a male child can be found across various subsamples: urban and rural, older and younger mothers, mothers with high and low education. The estimates are robust to including linear cohort-year time trends and prenatal health care controls. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper situates psychoanalytic exploration of abortion within a politically polarized culture, in which claims of psychological and moral hazard are weaponized to undermine women's reproductive freedom. Reflecting on these political perils and building on Sullivan's notion of consensually validated experience as central to reflective functioning, the author locates psychoanalytic silence around abortion as part of a broader socio-cultural disavowal. Without a framework in which to describe the abortion decision as an ethical choice, rooted in a sense of responsibility for self and other, dissociation of these complex dimensions becomes a tool of political expediency. Yet the costs of splitting off the ethical and psychological complexities of the abortion decision are significant: Little support is provided to women faced with this decision, and conversations about ethical complexities are shut-down, creating a void that has been filled by the anti-abortion movement. The urgent question for psychoanalysts is: How do we help women formulate abortion narratives – including the healing, traumatic, and ethical dimensions – when the cultural debate around not just abortion but women's decision-making power, generally, precludes such complexities? This is a question that has implications far beyond the consulting room: Listening to women on their own terms is crucial if we are ever to build a socio-legal framework that better reflects and protects their lived experience. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We report on a comparative situational analysis of comprehensive abortion care (CAC) in Botswana, Eswatini, Lesotho and Namibia. We conducted systematic literature searches and country consultations and used a reparative health justice approach (with four dimensions) for the analysis. The following findings pertain to all four countries, except where indicated. Individual material dimension: pervasive gender-based violence (GBV); unmet need for contraception (15−17%); high HIV prevalence; poor abortion access for rape survivors; fees for sexual and reproductive health (SRH) services (Eswatini). Collective material dimension: no clear national budgeting for SRH; over-reliance on donor funding (Eswatini; Lesotho); no national CAC guidelines or guidance on legal abortion access; poor data collection and management systems; shortage and inequitable distribution of staff; few facilities providing abortion care. Individual symbolic dimension: gender norms justify GBV; stigma attached to both abortion and unwed or early pregnancies. Collective symbolic dimension: policy commitments to reducing unsafe abortion and to post-abortion care, but not to increasing access to legal abortion; inadequate research; contradictions in abortion legislation (Botswana); inadequate staff training in CAC. Political will to ensure CAC within the country's legislation is required. Reparative health justice comparisons provide a powerful tool for foregrounding necessary policy and practice change. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines a 1962 episode of The Defenders as a landmark scripted drama that staged a debate about unplanned pregnancies and abortion access in the early network era. "The Benefactor" served as a test of television networks' authority, and its success created space for more open discussion of controversial topics in prime time. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

During the so-called Pink Tide (1998–2018), in which a surge of left-wing governments assumed power in Latin America, the region significantly expanded guarantees of equality and non-discrimination. In that period, six Latin American countries took steps to decriminalise abortion, eight recognised equal marriage, and twelve recognised the right to gender identity and a name change procedure for trans people. Nevertheless, in Venezuela, where the Pink Tide started, the authorities resisted all efforts to advance abortion decriminalisation or promote human rights related to sexual orientation and gender identity, even though Venezuela's leaders have associated themselves with the principles and values of social justice. A comparative analysis between the performance of Venezuela and other Latin American countries, and the findings of several interviews with Venezuelan human rights defenders, show a lack of chavismo's political will, rooted in populism and militarism, to support the participation processes that allow legislative advocacy and judicial activism to advance human rights related to abortion, same-sex marriage, and gender identity. Although Venezuelan authorities proposed alternatives to private property and social assistance programmes, they perpetuated heteropatriarchy by ignoring critical components of the agendas of sexual, reproductive, and gender identity rights defenders, prioritising electoral calculations and relations with religious movements. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]