Abstract
Christabelle Sethna and Gayle Davis, eds., Johns Hopkins University Press, Baltimore, 2019, 360pp., ISBN: 978-1-421-42729-4, $59.95 (Hbk)
Abortion travel is a historical and contemporary phenomenon that is likely to continue and potentially increase due to global regressions in abortion law and access. Considering the contexts and factors that influence and structure abortion travel is both vital and timely. Abortion Across Borders: Transnational Travel and Access to Abortion Services provides an impressive global breadth of case studies, including chapters focusing on well-known abortion travel locations such as Britain, Ireland and the US, but also under-explored areas including Canada, Poland, Sweden, New Zealand, Australia, Spain and the former Yugoslavia. One of the key contributions of the collection is to underscore the fact that travel is not always across national borders but is sometimes within them, due to pockets of resistance to liberal abortion laws restricting local access to services. With abortion, law is only one step on a long journey to safe, local and free abortion access.
Despite the specific peculiarities of each case study, the chapters of this book often overlap thematically, as we see reoccurring themes in a variety of contexts. These include the specific role of healthcare providers as gatekeepers to services and information, whose role can either restrict or facilitate access to abortion; the activist networks of solidarity that spring up to fill the gap when services are denied and that can be one of the most important facilitators of abortion travel; and the sense of secrecy and stigma that pervades these journeys as women feel ‘outlawed’ from their home temporarily. The book also highlights that the abortion journey, whilst difficult for all, exacerbates already existing inequalities based on factors such as income, ethnicity, citizenship status, age and the rural–urban divide.
Abortion as a field of academic inquiry is currently growing at speed (see, for example, Bloomer, Pierson and Estrada-Claudio, 2018) within a variety of disciplines, and abortion travel is an important branch of this study. This collection highlights the diversity of disciplinary and methodological approaches to abortion research spanning legal analysis, historical tracing, qualitative interviews and statistical analysis to explore the impact of abortion travel. One point of interest that is raised in the book is naming and situating the field, discussed in depth in Christabelle Sethna’s introduction and the chapters on Ireland and Prince Edward Island (Chapters 5 and 8). Health tourism, which grew as a field in the 1990s, tends to ignore women generally and abortion specifically. However, tourism—a term with connotations of choice and pleasure—may trivialise this specific form of inequality and ignore the wider structures limiting access to health services at home. Cathrine Chambers, Colleen MacQuarrie and Jo-Ann MacDonald (Chapter 8) develop their previous work on abortion travel (MacQuarrie et al., eds., 2018) by investigating the term ‘abortion refugee’; however, this term may be problematic as it misses the temporary nature of the journey and the inequalities that continue to exist on return, including intransient legal systems, lack of access to post-abortion care and the potential stigma from disclosure. Mary Gilmartin and Sinead Kennedy (Chapter 5) put forward the term ‘reproductive mobility’, which fits well in the Irish context where travel to England has not just been for abortion but also in the past to give birth and arrange adoptions, and globally this helps to include abortion within the wider spectrum of reproductive justice issues. Mobility also underscores the fact that while many can be mobile, others cannot and will remain ‘stuck’.
The final chapter of the book, by Niklas Barke, examines what was viewed to be the biggest potential inhibitor of abortion travel to the UK: Brexit. The collection ends on a positive note with the conclusion that a ‘soft Brexit’ will most likely still enable women to access abortion in the UK with minimal disruptions. However, Brexit now seems like a small bump in the road in light of current global travel restrictions and their impact on women’s access to abortion, both by the restriction of travel and for the potential regressions in abortion laws pushed forward whilst our attention is focused elsewhere. As such, interrogating, explaining and understanding abortion travel will be more important than ever.
We are currently in the midst of a global pandemic that is having a profound short-term, and potentially long-term, impact on our mobility both locally and globally. Already this is having an impact on women’s ability to access abortion and on attempts to further restrict abortion laws globally. For example, several US states have declared abortion non-essential medical care, attempting to halt abortion entirely during the pandemic; and in regions of Italy, medical abortion procedures have been cancelled, leaving women to seek surgical procedures in already overstretched hospitals. In Northern Ireland, despite recent changes to the law, a telemedicine policy for abortion services has not been adopted, even though the rest of the UK has done so, and countries such as India and Argentina are reporting shortages of abortion medication.