Safe, legal, and affordable abortion is widely recognized as an essential medical service for women across the world. When access to that service is denied or restricted, women are compelled to carry unwanted pregnancies to term, seek backstreet abortionists, attempt self-induced abortions, or even travel to less restrictive states, provinces, and countries to receive care.
Abortion across Borders focuses on travel across domestic and international boundaries to terminate a pregnancy. Christabelle Sethna and Gayle Davis have gathered a cadre of authors to examine how restrictive policies force women to move both within and across national borders in order to reach abortion providers, often at great expense, with significant safety risks, and over long distances. Taking historical and contemporary perspectives, contributors examine the situation in regions that include Texas, Prince Edward Island, Ireland, Australia, the United Kingdom, and Eastern Europe. Throughout, they take a feminist intersectional approach to transnational travel and access to abortion services that is sensitive to inequalities of gender, race, and class in reproductive health care.
This multidisciplinary volume raises challenging logistical, legal, and ethical questions while exploring the gendered aspects of medical tourism. A noticeable rollback of reproductive rights and renewed attention to border security in many parts of the world will make Abortion across Borders of timely interest to scholars of gender and women's studies, health, medicine, law, mobility studies, and reproductive justice.
Contributors: Barbara Baird, Niklas Barke, Anna Bogic, Hayley Brown, Lori A. Brown, Cathrine Chambers, Ewelina Ciaputa, Gayle Davis, Mary Gilmartin, Agata Ignaciuk, Sin+¬ad Kennedy, Lena Lennerhed, Jo-Ann MacDonald, Colleen MacQuarrie, Jane O'Neill, Clare Parker, Christabelle Sethna, Sally Sheldon
Acknowledgments
Introduction Christabelle Sethna
Part I. Flight Risks 1. Sherri Finkbine Flew to Sweden: Abortion and Disability in the Early 1960s Lena Lennerhed 2. From Heathrow Airport to Harley Street: The ALRA and the Travel of Non-resident Women for Abortion Services in Britain Christabelle Sethna 3. The Trans-Tasman Abortion Travel Service: Abortion Services for New Zealand Women in the 1970s Hayley Brown
Part II. Domestic Transgressions 4. All Aboard the ""Abortion Express"": Geographic Variability, Domestic Travel, and the 1967 British Abortion Act Gayle Davis, Jane O'Neill, Clare Parker, and Sally Sheldon 5. A Double Movement: The Politics of Reproductive Mobility in Ireland Mary Gilmartin and Sinéad Kennedy 6. Tales of Mobility: Women's Travel and Abortion Services in a Globalized Australia Barbara Baird 7. Don't Mess with Texas: Abortion Policy, Texas-Style Lori Brown 8. Trials and Trails: The Emergence of Canada's Abortion Refugees in Prince Edward Island Cathrine Chambers, Colleen MacQuarrie, and Jo-Ann MacDonald
Part III. Democratic Transitions 9. Abortion Travel and the Cost of Reproductive Choice in Spain Agata Ignaciuk 10. ""The Import Problem"": The Travels of Our Bodies, Ourselves, to Eastern Europe Anna Bogic 11. The Illegal Abortion Underground, Abortion Tourism, and the Catholic Church in Poland Ewelina Ciaputa 12. Brexit and Reproductive Healthcare: Abortion Access for Women Traveling to Post-EU Britain Niklas Barke
