Enacting Reproductive Autonomy, Prefiguring Feminist Futures

• In Event: Feminist Affects and Attachments

Abstract

In this paper, I develop a conception of reproductive autonomy as the freedom of embodied subjects to engage in individual and collective self-determination. My account of reproductive autonomy is rooted in an analysis of guerilla abortion networks, which provide safe illegal abortions in contexts where abortion is prohibited or otherwise inaccessible. Excluded from the law and neoliberal healthcare institutions, these underground clinics are exposed to potential repression but also granted a reprieve from the normalizing constraints of state regulation and professionalized medicine. Within this abject space, the constraints on political imagination are loosened, enabling guerilla abortion activists to re-invent medical practice in ways that affirm reproductive autonomy by empowering patients, undoing hierarchies, and producing hybrid knowledges that mix the official expertise of medical professionals with the vernacular expertise of experience. Through consciousness-raising and direct action, guerilla abortion networks construct transnational networks of self-help and mutual aid that prefigure new modes of collective life. Connecting this analysis of guerilla abortion networks to feminist strands in anarchist and autonomist Marxist thought, I argue that guerilla abortion networks should be understood as a post-capitalist feminist undercommons, or an alternative lifeworld woven beneath and through the hegemonic order of the state and the medical-industrial complex. Rather than placing faith in legal reform, I advocate cultivating this feminist undercommons into the means of social reproduction for a potential future in which self-organizing communities of free and equal embodied subjects collaborate to ensure reproductive autonomy and mutual flourishing.

Author

• Brittany Leach, University of Virginia