The production of ignorance about medication abortion in Tunisia: between state policies, medical opposition, patriarchal logics and Islamic revival.

In Tunisia, medication abortion has been available in government reproductive and sexual health clinics since the early 2000s. Since its introduction, it has rapidly replaced the surgical method, and between 75% and 80% of abortions in the public sector were performed using the pharmacological protocol in 2016. In this article, I intend to discuss the various forms of ignorance about medication abortion that exist in Tunisia among several categories of actors in relation to the legal, medical and religious domains. I explore how the existing 'varieties of ignorance' are related to the specific political, social and economic positions of the involved actors, the dominant gender regime, specific institutional policies and economic interests. I also investigate how some forms of ignorance are wilfully produced by institutions and individuals, whereas others are the result of positionality or organizational features. I first describe when and how medication abortion was introduced in Tunisia and the forms of resistance it elicited; later, I examine the production of ignorance about this technology after the revolution of 2011. I mainly consider practices and discourses of health professionals, but also those of women seeking abortion care in the public sector, and those of the activists of a Tunisian non-governmental organization operating in the domain of women's health and rights.

Governing Reproduction in Post-revolutionary Tunisia: Contraception, Abortion and Infertility.

Following a neo-Malthusian rationality, the Tunisian independent state has promoted biomedical contraception and legalized abortion to lower the national fertility rate. Whereas for 40 years non-reproduction has been the objective of official demographic policies, IVF private clinics are a flourishing industry. In this article, I explore the contradictory effects of (non-)reproductive biomedical technologies by showing how they contribute to the non-reproduction of certain categories of citizens and force others to reproduce.

The Right to Abortion in Tunisia after the Revolution of 2011: Legal, Medical, and Social Arrangements as Seen through Seven Abortion Stories.

In this article, we explore the effects that Tunisia's post-revolutionary democratization process has had on the right to abortion, drawing on ethnographic material, interviews, and medical files that we collected between 2013 and 2017, as well as the professional experience of one of us. We show that despite the existence of a relatively liberal abortion law for more than 40 years, women in Tunisia have trouble getting abortion care for economic and organizational but also ideological and political reasons. The existence of the abortion law constitutes but one factor among many others that determine women's ability to access abortion services; medical practices and women's abortion itineraries are caught up within complex arrangements that entail multiple socioeconomic and cultural factors, political transformations, the variability of rules in medical and administrative institutions, and contradictory interpretations of the legal apparatus. Examining the abortion itineraries of seven women we met in a large hospital in Tunis, we argue that these abortion itineraries shed light on the ordinary constraints experienced by poor Tunisian women who cannot afford to turn to the private sector. We maintain that attitudes toward the right to abortion in post-revolutionary Tunisia are problematic and that the democratization of local society has brought about unexpected consequences that do not extend but rather reduce women's rights in the domain of sexual and reproductive health.

Abortion in Tunisia after the revolution: Bringing a new morality into the old reproductive order.

The emergence of Islamist movements and religious symbolic repertoires in the aftermath of the Tunisian revolution has elicited the political, moral, and practical contestation of women's right to abortion. While, after several heated debates, the law was eventually not modified, several practitioners working in government family planning clinics have changed their behaviour preventing women getting abortions. Pre-existing state and medical logics, political uncertainties, and new religious and moralising discourses have determined abortion practices in the government health-care facilities generating unequal treatments according to women's marital status, class, and education. This paper will investigate the multiple logics affecting abortion practices in post-revolutionary Tunisia, focusing on the dissonant logics mobilised by health-care professionals as well as structural socioeconomic factors.

The Detour of an Obstetric Technology: Active Management of Labor Across Cultures.

Active management of labor (AML) is an obstetric technology developed in Ireland in the 1970s to accelerate labor in nulliparous women. This technology achieved rapid success in Great Britain and in English-speaking countries outside America, which adopted it before many other states around the world. In this article, I explore AML's technical and social characteristics when it was first designed, and then examine its local inflections in a Jordanian and a Swiss maternity hospital to shed light on the ways its transnational circulation modifies its script. I argue that its application is shaped by local material constraints and specific sociocultural configurations, gender regimes, and hospital cultures. Finally, I make a comparative analysis of AML practices in these two settings and in the foundational textbook to disentangle the technical and sociocultural components modeling its local applications.