Judging voluntariness: abortion assistance around 1900, in: Rethinking History. The Journal of Theory and Practice (2024), 1-18 (original) (raw)
Related papers
“Unseen Faces of Law: Abortion and the Politics of the Body in ‘4 months, 3 weeks and 2 days’
Focusing on Cristian Mungiu’s film « 4 months, 3 weeks and 2 days », this paper attempts to examine the ambiguous place of law in Ceausescu’s Romania. Departing from Derrida’s understanding of law as “a powerful discourse, one which dominates, colonizes and perpetrates countless acts of violence by the act and fact of its very existence”, and taking into account Michel Foucault’s reminder of the uncertain relation between norm and transgression as developed in the “History of sexuality” my reading of the film proffers an alternative interpretation of the legal discourse as a positive, active-state apparatus that fashions identities, inflicts suffering and takes part in the total domination project.Though unseen and almost absent from the framework of the film, law is present in a more profound way in its very core, haunting each line. It is not only the theme that sutures the film’s narrative line, but also a shadowy, threatening presence that the characters relate to and are radically determined by. From this point of view, one might risk the idea of reading the film in relation to law as a legal drama, where characters are legal subjects linked inextricably to legal discourse.By developing this thesis to its ultimate conclusion, I focus mainly on the dynamics between the main characters, seen as embodiments of legal stances and power relations. First my analysis will try to uncover the character Mr. Bebe (Vlad Ivanov) as a representation of the menacing, threatening “force of law” with its “obscene message of unconditional exercise of Power”. Moving further along in this analysis and expanding on the political semantics of the relationship between power and life as found in the work of Giorgio Agamben, I try to offer an account of the feminine characters’ actions as radical strategies of resistance to the all- encompassing sovereign power.In doing so, I hope to further the idea of an account of life during “really existing socialism”, avoiding undertones of nostalgia and essentialist condemnation which both hinder serious interrogation of the concrete power relations in such a political space.
This paper was presented at the 2013 annual meeting of the German Studies Association as part of the panel, "Sexual Politics during the Wende: Space, Reproduction and Rights." The paper traces the alliance that developed between conservative Catholic women and radical West German feminists that developed in the 1980s in order to block the spread of new reproductive and genetic technologies. Although East German women showed little interest in this debate, the alliance between Catholic women and West German feminists would have long-term consequences for abortion policy in a reunified Germany. In the context of this alliance, the Catholic Church developed a new strategy for limiting women's access to abortion -- linking it to a violation of the rights of the disabled.
The power in our hands: Abortion practices and knowledge in Cold War Europe
• Agata Ignaciuk, Countertechnologies of care. Vacuum aspiration in Poland (1960s-1980s) • Bibia Pavard, The “Karman method” between China and California : realities and imaginaries of the vacuum abortion method in 1970s France • Azzurra Tafuro, With Karman, against Karman:The Italian trip of Harvey Karman between science and political contestation • Maria Mundi, The science of the Karman method in Spain The panel will be presented at the international conference "Whose choice, whose rights? Global-historical and intersectional approaches to the emergence of reproductive rights after 1945" (Glasgow, UK / online, 9 and 10 June 2022).
Feminist Opposition to Abortion: Reframing Histories to Limit Reproductive Rights
2015
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Encyclopédie d'histoire numérique de l'Europe / DIGITAL ENCYCLOPEDIA OF EUROPEAN HISTORY, 2021
The nineteenth century marked the history of abortion in modern Europe by formalizing its definitive legislative and religious condemnation. During the first half of the twentieth century, attitudes toward abortive practices combined the pro-natalist preoccupations of the French and Italian governments to take a harsher stance during the Second World War, while in Germany such practices became a tool to support the racial and eugenic policies of Nazism. The first signs of change appeared in the mid-1950s, when women’s and feminist movements began to take an interest in the issue. Beginning in the 1970s, “free and freely available” abortion was central to the demands of second-wave European feminism, profoundly updating the public debate on the issue, and prompting changes to laws and customs. During the final decades of the century, the decriminalization laws adopted in numerous European countries eliminated the transgression under certain conditions, but did not make abortion the right asserted by feminist movements. Le XIXème siècle marque l’histoire de l’avortement dans l’Europe contemporaine, en actant sa condamnation définitive sur le plan législatif et religieux. Pendant le premier XXème siècle, les attitudes à l’égard des pratiques abortives croisent les préoccupations natalistes des gouvernements français et italien pour se durcir pendant la Seconde Guerre mondiale, devenant en Allemagne un outil de soutien aux politiques raciales et eugéniques du nazisme. On assiste aux premiers signes d’un changement à partir du milieu des années 1950, quand les mouvements féminins et féministes commencent à s’intéresser à la question. À partir des années 1970, l’avortement « libre et gratuit » est au cœur des revendications du féminisme européen de la deuxième vague, renouvelant profondément le débat public sur la question et faisant évoluer les lois et les mœurs. Pendant les dernières décennies du siècle, les lois de dépénalisation adoptées par plusieurs pays européens suppriment l’infraction sous certaines conditions, mais ne font pas de l’avortement le droit revendiqué par les mouvements féministes.
Feminist Encounters: A Journal of Critical Studies in Culture and Politics, 2018
This paper explores how feminist movements in contemporary Ireland and the Women’s Liberation Movement in Britain in the 1970s and 1980s have subverted state domination and have struggled for self-governance of the female bodies in ways that represent a continuum of responses to restrictive legislation. We address how discourses of liberatory knowledges and autonomy can give rise to ‘illegitimate’ forms of self-care as well as extra-state care (or ‘exile’) across historically-situated points in time. Moreover, we illustrate how social resistance can influence political action surrounding abortion law reform, which can be understood as an attempt to bring the ‘illegitimate’ into the realm of state control and guardianship. Our comparative approach illustrates how campaigns around reproductive rights in contemporary Ireland and in 1970s and 1980s Britain continue to share three crucial strategies: to raise consciousness and awareness; to encourage mobilisation and self-organising of care at the individual and collective levels; and to seek legislative change. Mapping the continuities in how feminist campaigns configure reproductive health and the body as a site of activism in the body politic heralds renewed feminist encounters with the medical humanities, by (re)situating women’s bodies in a historically contiguous struggle for reproductive justice.