Accounting for abortion: Accomplishing transnational reproductive governance through post-abortion care in Senegal

ABSTRACT

Reproductive governance operates through calculating demographic statistics that offer selective truths about reproductive practices, bodies, and subjectivities. Post-abortion care, a global reproductive health intervention, represents a transnational reproductive regime that establishes motherhood as women’s primary legitimate reproductive status. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork conducted in Senegal between 2010 and 2011, I illustrate how post-abortion care accomplishes reproductive governance in a context where abortion is prohibited altogether and the US is the primary bilateral donor of population aid. Reproductive governance unfolds in hospital gynecological wards and the national health information system through the mobilization and interpretation of post-abortion care data. Although health workers search women’s bodies and behavior for signs of illegal abortion, they minimize police intervention in the hospital by classifying most post-abortion care cases as miscarriage. Health authorities deploy this account of post-abortion care to align the intervention with national and global maternal health policies that valorize motherhood. Although post-abortion care offers life-saving care to women with complications of illegal abortion, it institutionalizes abortion stigma by scrutinizing women’s bodies and masking induced abortion within and beyond the hospital. Post-abortion care reinforces reproductive inequities by withholding safe, affordable obstetric care from women until after they have resorted to unsafe abortion.

KEYWORDS:

• Unsafe abortion
• ethnography
• transnational reproductive governance
• stratified reproduction
• post-abortion care

Acknowledgements

I am very grateful to Professor Wendy Chavkin and to two anonymous reviewers for their feedback on this article.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

ORCID

Siri Suh http://orcid.org/0000-0002-7137-4195

Additional information

Funding

This project received funding from the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development [grant number F31HD059387], the Social Science Research Council, and the American Council of Learned Societies.