Abortion at the edges: Politics, practices, performances.

This article provides a brief overview of the state of discourse, politics and provision of abortion in the Anglophone West, including developments in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic. It then surveys three promising directions for feminist abortion scholarship. The first is work inspired by the Reproductive Justice Movement, that points to the intersectional axes of inequality that shape abortion discourse and position us in relation to reproductive choice and access issues. The second is work that examines the particularity of the constitution of the aborting body, reflecting the particularity of the pregnant body. This is a specific body, with a specific history; abortion discourse draws from and makes a significant contribution to the meaning and lived experience of this body. The third area of scholarship we highlight is that which seeks to amplify the meaning of abortion as a social good. Much abortion scholarship is attuned to a critique of negative aspects of abortion-from its representation in popular culture to restrictive law and access issues. This is critical work but/and the performative nature of abortion scholarship, like all discourse, means that it can amplify the association of negativity with abortion. The article concludes by introducing the articles contained in the special section of Women's Studies International Forum, 'Abortion at the edges: Politics, practices, performances'.

Abortion, decriminalisation and the medico-legal paradigm.

The medico-legal paradigm enmeshes legal with medical power, making abortion lawfully available only under the supervision of medical professionals. This article examines the recent parliamentary debates over abortion decriminalisation in New South Wales, Australia's most populous state, to argue that the decriminalisation of abortion in Australia represents a continuance with, rather than a break from, the medico-legal paradigm. The medical power embedded in laws that criminalised abortion in the nineteenth century, and liberalised abortion in the twentieth century, was not the same as that imagined by parliamentarians debating decriminalising abortion in the twenty-first century. Norms constituting abortion seekers and their doctors have shifted significantly. Nevertheless, the medico-legal paradigm continues to govern how lawful abortion is imagined. The medico-legal paradigm converts abortion seekers' desires for abortion into a need for healthcare and imagines the autonomy and agency of abortion seekers as enabled only through their subjection to medical power. This conversion, I suggest, dampens the potential abortion holds to open up and challenge norms of gender, sexuality and reproduction.

Abortion stigma, abortion exceptionalism, and medical curricula.

ABSTRACTWhile it is well established that medical student learning about abortion is inadequate and lacks systemisation, there is little research on why this might be the case. This exploratory study draws on a survey sent to 438 medical educators at Australia's 21 accredited medical schools through March-May 2021. Forty-eight educators responded to the survey. In this article, I examine their responses alongside policy and research on medical education to consider how curricula are determined. I conceptualise abortion exceptionalism - the singling out of abortion from other areas of medicine on the grounds that it is special, different, or more complex or risky than is empirically justified - as a mode of 'stigma-in-action', arguing that medical curricula are powerful sites for its reproduction and undoing.