Denial of Care: Framing the Loss of Abortion Rights Post-Dobbs

ABSTRACT

After Dobbs, abortion access advocates try to make clear the harm of abortion criminalization. Two figures came to dominate the landscape: the reproductive martyr and the tragic abortion provider. Their stories focus on the threat to the health and life of women who need abortion for medical reasons. While such stories can produce sympathy for individuals and outrage at abortion bans, they occlude more important accounts of the loss of abortion rights that focus on the gender inequality of bodily violability. Understanding abortion rights as an issue of freedom and equality provides better grounds for understanding their loss.

KEYWORDS:

• Abortion
• Gender equality
• stratified reproduction
• necropolitics
• biopolitics

Acknowledgments

I’d like to thank Rebekah Sterling, Rose Owen, and Wendy Wright for insightful comments on an earlier version of this draft.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1. I thank Morgan King, a former William & Mary undergraduate, for this framing. She wrote a senior seminar paper examining how death displaces claims of bodily autonomy in arguments for abortion access. She generously allowed me to extend her work in this article.

2. Of course, if we take reproduction as foundational to the state, as feminist scholars have aptly demonstrated, some abortions can be understood as resisting the demands of the state. I thank Rose Owen for this point.

3. Only Connecticut and Rhode Island have individual conscience clauses but not institutional or entity conscience clauses regarding abortion provision.

4. Anti-abortion activists succeeded in producing ever-more creative regulations of abortion whose end goal and effect was to restrict access, but in the process, many of these regulations worked through normalizing a particular relationship to gender. Take, for instance, waiting period, which functioned to set the norm that women were untrustworthy and reproductive decisionmakers and had to be coerced in taking the amount of time necessary to actually consider their decisions. Or ultrasound laws, premised on the notion that if women really knew their fetus (vis a vis medical imaging), they would form the correct emotional connection and thus decide against termination.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Claire McKinney

Claire McKinney is Assistant Professor of Government and Gender, Sexuality, and Women’s Studies at William & Mary. Her research on reproductive politics centers the relationship between medicine, politics, and gendered citizenship. Her book considering the role of medicine in structuring abortion politics and gendered domination in the United States is under contract with New York University Press.