Event Description
The Sociology Department and the Thomas R. Kline School of Law are co-sponsors of a colloquium featuring visiting speaker Lucía Berro Pizzarossa, associate and post-doctoral fellow at the Georgetown University Law Center O’Neill Institute for National and Global Health Law. Her work has been published in renowned peer-reviewed journals such as BMC International Health and Human Rights, Sexual and Reproductive Health Matters, and Harvard Health and Human Rights.
Pizzarossa will address the ways in which self-managed abortion (SMA) fundamentally challenges and alters meanings of abortion care and abortion provision representing a deliberate move towards new ways of making meaning and (re)imagining abortions.
Globally, abortion has largely been understood, researched, and regulated within a medico-legal paradigm. However, self-managed abortion (SMA) questions the centrality of the law and bio-medical paradigms, as well as the presumed individuality of abortion decision-making that it is predicated on. SMA offers an “enticing and hazardous” (Donnan & Magowan, 2009, p. 9) challenge to traditional legal and biomedical understandings of and approaches to abortion, as well as to social, religious, (pro)creative conventions.
In this paper, we detail how abortion remains exceptionalized, setting conditions for “permissible transgressions”. We explore how SMA fundamentally challenges and alters meanings of abortion care and abortion provision: from whose authority and knowledge is valued and centered, to the environments that abortion is possible in, to issuing a broader challenge around how abortion itself is understood and depicted, and how SMA, thus, represents a deliberate move towards new ways of making meaning and (re)imagining abortions. |
