Towards a poststructural understanding of abortion and social class in England

ABSTRACT

Despite previous research suggesting that social class influences experiences of and attitudes to abortion, there is a dearth of research which studies the intersection of abortion and social class in England. Across the UK, abortion rates and experiences differ by region and socio-economic status, reflecting broader health inequalities. Contemporary austerity in the UK creates an imperative for new research which contextualises the experience of abortion within this socio-historical moment, and the worsening inequalities which have accompanied it. Whilst work on abortion and social inequality exists, it has often approached class as an a priori category. I argue that contemporary post-structural work on class provides a framework to go beyond this approach by examining how these social classifications occur; who has the power to classify; and how these classifications might be resisted. This framework is demonstrated with emerging findings from a life history study of abortion experiences in England. The applications of this to the work on abortion are potentially rich, because the act of ending a pregnancy invites classification from many quarters, from the legal (legal/illegal) to the medical (early/late) to the moral (deserved/undeserved). This work, therefore, speaks to public health concerns about access to and stigma around abortion and social inequalities.

KEYWORDS:

• Abortion
• England
• social class
• inequality
• austerity

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

ORCID

Gillian Love http://orcid.org/0000-0001-8180-1448

Notes

1 The full seven categorisations are Elite, Established Middle Class, Technical Middle Class, New Affluent Workers, Emergent Service Workers, Traditional Working Class and Precariat (Savage et al., 2013).

2 All names have been changed.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Economic and Social Research Council [grant number 1363862].