Re-situating abortion: Bio-politics, global health and rights in neo-liberal times

ABSTRACT

New modes of neoliberal and rights-based reproductive governance are emerging across the world which either paradoxically foreclose access to universal health services or promote legislative reform without providing a continuum of services on the ground. These shifts present new opportunities for the expansion but also the limitation of abortion provision conceptually and ‘on-the-ground’, both in the Global North and South. The collection of papers in this special issue examine current abortion governance discourse and practice in historical, socio-political contexts to analyse the threat posed to women's sexual and reproductive health and rights globally. Focusing on abortion politics in the context of key intersectional themes of morality, law, religion and technology, the papers conceptually ‘re-situate’ the analysis of abortion with reference to a changing global landscape where new modes of consumption, rapid flows of knowledge and information, increasingly routinised recourse to reproductive technologies and related forms of bio-sociality and solidarity amongst recipients and practitioners coalesce.

Acknowledgement

The authors would like to thank the Centre for Cultures of Reproduction, Technologies and Health and the University of Sussex for hosting the workshop this Special Issue is based on. We would like to thank the contributing authors for their collaboration and quick responses to editorial requests, and to the editors and managing editor of Global Public Health for their timely guidance and support throughout the process.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.