Siri Suh

Thematic Session on “Liberating Abortion: Intersectional and Transnational Opportunities for Achieving Reproductive Justice." This panel centers intersectional and transnational research to explore the constraints and opportunities for reimagining and liberating abortion. Globally, abortion policy has trended toward legalization and decriminalization, with the United States as outlier in allowing state governments to criminalize abortion seekers and providers. Reacting to this change, advocates have looked to courts, professionalized medicine, and global public health authorities (e.g., the World Health Organization) for solutions, actions in line with the normative situating of abortion within medicalized and legalized frameworks in public and scholarly discourses. The construction of abortion as primarily—or even exclusively—intelligible through law and medicine, however, is not inevitable. Indeed, these frameworks not only fail historically excluded populations, they contribute to and perpetuate systemic oppression. In this thematic session, we ask what the liberation of abortion from legal and/or medicalized paradigms could look like. What, in other words, are alternative ways of “doing” abortion, with an emphasis on feminist, Global South, antiracist, and anti-institutionalist approaches and experiences? While much abortion research has engaged questions of public opinion or the social movement politics of abortion, this session interrogates different questions, including critiques of contemporary models of abortion health services and exploration of alternatives; the discursive and material location of abortion care within existing reproductive healthcare systems, including those that are under-resourced and fragmented; and reconceptualization of the social imaginary of abortion. We seek to open conceptual space for new un-imaginables, including opportunities for joy in abortion and the possibilities of self-ownership of all pregnancy outcomes.

My project explores how misoprostol, a uterotonic medication, is transforming the technological, political, and professional landscape of population governance in Francophone Africa. Although misoprostol has been widely recognized as an essential obstetric medication, its application remains highly contested precisely because it disrupts medical and legal authority over pregnancy, delivery, and abortion. Drawing on ethnography in Burkina Faso and Senegal, I investigate how transnational stakeholders harness misoprostol toward the achievement of neo-Malthusian demographic targets related to maternal health and fertility. I study how misoprostol's promotion within the private health care sector reinforces unequal distributions of obstetric care according to residence, wealth, social capital, and access to technology. I argue that access to misoprostol cannot simply be boiled down to its availability in pharmacies, or its affordability on the market. Portrayals of misoprostol as a " magic bullet, " while hopeful about the drug's potential to reduce maternal mortality, insufficiently capture the complex transnational politics that shape how and where it is available and used (or not), and by whom. This project explores how a pill that promises to reduce maternal mortality by placing obstetric care directly " in women's hands " simultaneously opens and forecloses possibilities for reproductive justice in Francophone Africa.