Dr Olivia Engle

Abortion mobilities emerged within political geography and the reproductive mobilities scholarship to address extant theoretical and empirical gaps in these fields. This paper seeks to highlight and assess the abortion mobilities scholarship to date. Starting with a working definition of abortion mobilities, this paper argues for the relevance of abortion to political geography and outlines three key themes in political geography that abortion mobilities address: borders, states and anti-genderism, intersectional politics and reproductive justice, and activism and abortion pills.

The advent of telemedicine abortion in 2020 in the United States meant that abortion care was increasingly pushed out of clinical settings and into the home. Yet, within the context of abortion inequalities and restrictions in the US, there is often more focus on provision of and access to medication abortion via telemedicine than there is on what happens after the abortion pills are acquired. This paper brings together and advances scholarship in abortion, care, and home geographies to address this empirical gap by exploring the material, temporal and spatial dimensions of telemedicine abortion care at home, and examining how these dimensions shape the embodied, emotional, and affective experience of abortion care. Telemedicine abortion allows individuals to self-manage the timing, symptoms, and space of their abortion, thereby creating a caring atmosphere. A geographical perspective on telemedicine abortion reveals that taking the abortion pills at home shapes the experience of abortion care.

The abortion road trip is a narrative device that has emerged in the last decade whereby the central plot of the story is the journey taken in search of an abortion. In this paper we analyze two young adult novels (Girls on the Verge and Unpregnant) and two films (Grandma and Never Rarely Sometimes Always) that follow adolescent girls traveling for abortions in the contemporary United States. Through the analysis of these four narratives, we argue that representations of the abortion road trip are novel for their focus on the barriers and politics of abortion access in the United States. While the representations do prioritize certain barriers over others, they mark an important shift in abortion discourse in popular culture. Instead of the ‘drama’ of the plot being the decision to have an abortion, it is increasingly other socio-politico-legal issues such as the lack of abortion clinics, the distance required to travel, legal rights for adolescents, the cost of the procedure, and the opinions of family and friends that take center stage. The focus on these structural, political barriers can help to educate audiences about the realities of abortion access in the US and move abortion discourse beyond the individual.

Over the past few decades growing attention has focused on the perceived challenge of adolescent pregnancy and the need for girls to make ‘smart choices’. This has generated considerable debate particularly because of the failure of many programmes and interventions to consider the structural constraints faced by young women in accessing sexual and reproductive health and rights (SRHR). Yet limited attention has been given to the views and experiences of girls’ parents and caregivers, many of whom were often adolescent parents themselves. We use data from the Real Choices, Real Lives longitudinal study conducted by Plan International to consider how the experiences of girls’ families shape their attitudes to teenage pregnancy in the Dominican Republic and El Salvador. Many families believe girls need to practise abstinence and avoid men and boys but given the lack of provision for SRHR faced by young women this response is not unexpected.