Reproductive rights at home? Prohibiting telehealth abortion in South Australia during the COVID-19 pandemic

Abstract

At the start of the COVID-19 pandemic in Australia, as governments urged citizens to limit their movements and socially isolate as a protective strategy, the home became a place layered with new meanings. Feminists have long challenged characterisations of the home as a sanctuary. Such characterisations and feminist claims against them took on new complexity and significance during the pandemic. This article investigates access to abortion care in South Australia under COVID-19 restrictions, as a case study of the contest over the safety of the home. It examines the pre-existing legislative requirements placed on those in need of abortion that, in the context of the pandemic and newly available access to telehealth medicine, both illuminated and increased the exceptional status of abortion as a form of healthcare and complicated the gendered meanings of safety and home.

Keywords:

• Abortion activism
• COVID-19
• home
• medical abortion
• South Australia

Acknowledgements

The authors are grateful to Dr Jeremy Ryder for excellent research assistance, the Office of the Deputy Vice Chancellor Research, Flinders University for a research grant to undertake the project: ‘A public health system response to abortion provision during the COVID-19 pandemic,’ and the 11 research participants for their valuable time and expertise.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1 For a detailed analysis of saaac’s 2020 campaign that draws on this data, see Barbara Baird, Prudence Flower, Catherine Kevin and Sharyn Roach Anleu (2022) ‘When More is Less: Emergency Powers, COVID-19 and Abortion in South Australia, 2020’ International Journal for Crime, Justice and Social Democracy https://doi.org/10.5204/ijcjsd.2236

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Barbara Baird

Assoc. Prof. Barbara Baird is an interdisciplinary scholar in Women’s and Gender Studies at Flinders University. She publishes in the fields of feminist and queer histories and is a chief investigator on the project ‘Gender and sexual politics: Changing citizenship in Australia since 1969’. Barbara is one of Australia’s leading abortion scholars and is currently writing a monograph on the history of abortion provision for Melbourne University Press.

Prudence Flowers

Dr. Prudence Flowers is Senior Lecturer in US History at Flinders University. She publishes on activist movements in the US and the politics of gender, sexuality and the body. Prudence is the author of The Right-to-Life Movement, the Reagan administration and the Politics of Abortion (Palgrave Macmillan, 2019) and has recently completed an internationally comparative project exploring provision and access to late termination of pregnancy.

Catherine Kevin

Assoc. Prof. Catherine Kevin is a historian at Flinders University. She is the lead chief investigator on the project ‘A History of Domestic Violence in Australia 1850–2020’. Catherine publishes on the histories of maternal and reproductive politics and Indigenous-settler relations in Australia. She is the author of Dispossession and the Making of ‘Jedda’: Hollywood in Ngunnawal Country (Anthem, 2020).

Sharyn Roach Anleu

Sharyn Roach Anleu is Matthew Flinders Distinguished Professor at Flinders University, a Fellow of the Academy of the Social Sciences in Australia and a former President of The Australian Sociological Association. Her most recent books are Judging and Emotion: A Socio-legal Analysis, with Kathy Mack (2021) and Judges, Judging and Humour, co-edited with Jessica Milner Davis (2019).