Reproducing Abortion: A Feminist Conversation on Bodily Autonomy in the Shadow of Dobbs
International Women's Day
Friday 8th March, 2024
This International Women's Day Research Seminar was chaired by Professor Ann Genovese (Melbourne Law School) with presentations from Johanna Commins (Melbourne Law School), Dr Elena Caruso (University of Waterloo, Canada), and Dr Erica Millar (La Trobe University).
The responsibilities of feminist scholars are specific and important, sharing traditions across disciplines and locations of centring experience, maintaining scepticism toward positivist projects, and devising methodologies that respond to the diffuse operation of law’s refusal of gendered agency and status. This feminist scholarly responsibility is particularly acute in the contemporary moment for scholars whose work challenges the laws, histories, stories and tropes that confine and limit women’s access to, and experience of, abortion. In this seminar, three scholars discussed their work on this topic. They addressed how their distinct methodologies, which draw across and between law, gender studies, literature, and history, bring feminist activism and interdisciplinary feminist scholarship into necessary relationship. The seminar we hoped opened up a shared conversation about how feminist work on abortion, be it in Italy, Australia, or the US, is more important than ever to advocate for the bodily autonomy of women and gender diverse peoples in 2024.
Johanna Commins: The Handmaid Realised: Reading the decision in Dobbs v Jackson’s Women Health Organization through the prism of Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale
As a law and literature researcher, I am interested in the ways in which the regulation of abortion access and public discourse about that access reinforces particular representations of women and pregnant bodies. Taking the figure of the Handmaid from Margaret Atwood’s novel, The Handmaid’s Tale, as my starting point, I read the majority and minority decisions in Dobbs v Jackson Women’s Health Organization as refracting the Handmaid’s double nature. Beneath Justice Alito’s claim for the majority that the Court was returning the contested question of abortion back to the states, is a reductive view of the abortion seeking woman as ‘fallen’ and therefore undeserving of constitutional protection. In response, the minority Justices write back to their conservative colleagues in the ironic, critical mode of the Handmaid who resists the regime that creates her. Critiquing patriarchal representations of women and reimagining those representations from multiple points of view of lived experience is a long serving and still much needed feminist practice.
Dr Elena Caruso: The ‘Becoming Legal’ of Abortion in Italy
In my presentation, I argued that ‘becoming legal’ provides a valuable framework to examine processes of legalisation in a more complex and nuanced way (Enright and Cloatre 2017 and 2018), addressing some limitations of what I defined as a ‘legal reform centrism’. By ‘legal reform centrism’, I broadly refer to a narrow and formal perspective on the analysis of legal change prevalent in legal scholarship, including in strands of feminist legal studies, and in studies of social movements and the law. I demonstrated why the notion of ‘becoming legal’ is instrumental in bringing to light processes, practices, and social movements that contribute to shaping new legal meanings, but which are often marginalized in conventional accounts of legal reform. To develop this argument, I narrowed my focus to the ‘becoming legal’ of abortion in Italy from 1971 to 1981, emphasizing the pivotal role played by the feminist movement in this transformative process. Over this ten-year span, I delved into the feminist campaigns and the corresponding legal changes concerning abortion. This includes the complete removal of draconian bans dating back to 1930 during the Fascist era and the introduction of a more liberal framework, marked by the constitutional ruling 27/1975 and the approval of Law 194/1978.
Dr Erica Millar: Abortion within and outside of the medico-legal paradigm
Even though Australian jurisdictions have some of the most liberal abortion laws worldwide, abortion continues to be regulated in a way that is more restrictive than the web of criminal, civil, administrative and disciplinary regulations that govern other medical services (Sheldon 2016). The ‘medico-legal’ paradigm continues to frame how the ‘problem’ of abortion is addressed through law, within which legalisation through regulation, and medical control and supervision, is considered the endpoint of decriminalisation, and the only means of guaranteeing safe abortion. A characteristic feature of the medico-legal paradigm is doctors’ control over the performance of abortion, a control that channels abortion seekers into relationships with health institutions and professionals. In this presentation I compared the normative frameworks that underpin heavily structured medical assessments for abortion with alternative modes of supporting abortion seekers that have developed in countries with restrictive legal regimes. I considered the normative effects of framing abortion seekers as medical patients, and interpreting their want for abortion as a need for health care. I argued that we need to interrogate the political imaginaries that confine how optimal systems of abortion provision are approached and to move beyond a vision of reproductive autonomy that posits abortion legalisation as one of its core endpoints.