(Im)mobilities and the regulation of healthcare Flashcards
Medical tourism in Ireland. Not everybody has the means to travel
Gilmartin & White (2022)
Abortion was made illegal in 1983 in Ireland
Chile-Peru abortion corridor and biopolitics
Freeman (2017)
Abortion pills - how can a state control swallowing?
Fight over mobility and knowledge
Morally incoherent regulatory framework
Not a panacea for deficient healthcare but a showcasing of agency and resistance
Sheldon (2016, 2018)
Abortion pill flows in Ireland and ‘unruly mobility’
Connections between mobile objects scramble physical borders
State trying to re-assert control over circulation
Calkin (2021)
The biopolitical womb as a site of regulation.
Women’s wombs as the property of the government, using them to draw up regulations for social engineering projects
Womb becomes a separate legal arena, oxymoronically taking precedent over the body of the person who supports it
Miller (2007)
Abortion deserts: 27 in total
6 states only have one abortion facility and a combined population of 4m residents of reproductive age who will be forced to travel.
Mobility is most challenging for lower-income women and those living in states with the lowest gestational limits.
Cartwright et al (2018)
Links to Cohen & Joffe (2020): the everyday reality of getting an abortion in the USA
Introduction to the special issue on reproductive mobilities.
Gaps: embodied nature of abortion travel; mobility of objects and materials; intersectional framework
Need to dissect what mobility means in different contexts
Speier et al (2020)
The transportation of medication holds emancipatory potential (viapolitics - the vehicle as a site of strategic political action)
We should consider the journeys of things, not just people
And the capacity to move is not always iherently liberatory
Freeman (2020)
Forced birth travel and Indigenous women in rural Canada
Contextualised within historic and ongoing systems of oppression
Resurgence of culturally-based doulas/birth workers to re-assert sovereignty over birth experiences since it is against Indigenous tradition to travel away from home
Indigenous reproductive mobilities - need to pick apart what mobility means when intersecting with different types of bodies
Cidro et al (2020)
The chemical geographies of misoprotol.
Combining a chemical geography, medical anthropology and feminist STS framework to re-scale abortion geographies down to the molecular level.
The pill’s chemical properties are entangled and mutually constitutive of global political dynamics, the politics of knowledge/science production and scaffolding of mobilities/information.
Proposes ‘pharmacokinetical geographies’ to refer to how the highly specific spatial differences of the pill’s consumption (e.g. its placement in the body) are linked to wider regimes.
Freeman & Rodriguez (2024)
Links to Schurr et al (2023) Feminist geography of technoscience
Case study of Irish abortion activists, who turned the pill from a technology of protest to a technology of access through The Abortion Pill Bus, a mobile clinic
Pills used to agitate for change, not just to enable access during the wait
Combination of mobility + materiality as resistance
Activism potentially portrayed abortion as a spectacular act of civil disobedience, trivialising the physical and emotional trauma
McCaffrey (2023)
Feminist geography of technoscience
* Feminist STS - technology reproduces existing socio-spatial inequalities; is enmeshed with our bodies; centring questions of social justice and the intimate as a scale of analysis
* E.G. The clinic shapes intimate experieinces of reproduction and abortion through monitoring, pain-alleviating and life-saving technology. But also implies the low-tech alternative space of the home is an invalid site of abortion
* Increasing normalisation of scientific approach to birth has turned the clinic into the ‘normal’ site of labour where bodies interact with different types of technologies to survey, manage or control reproductive lives
Schurr et al (2023)
Links to TRAP laws that seek to control the micro-geographies of the clinic and to Romanian case study (Calkin et al, 2022) where the state enrolled medical professionals and the space of the hospital into its policing of abortion
Case study: representations of the abortion road trip in novels and films.
* Representations of abortion in pop culture play an important role in influencing perception of abortion
* The abortion road trip narrative device is novel in its focus on the barriers/politics of abortion access in the USA by shifting the ‘drama’ away from the decision itself towards broader issues e.g. the lack of clinics, emotional toll, cost, distance travelled
Engle & Freeman (2022)
