Necessary Freedom: The Contradictions of Abortion in Quarantine (Pre-Recorded)

• In Event: Political Theories of Reproduction

Abstract

Abortion rights in the United States have, in the words of Penelope Deutscher, operated as their own inverted state of exception (2008, 60). That is, in the state of exception, the normal law is suspended to create a state of non-legality for the function of exceptional violence. In this inverted state of exception, the general law considers abortion to be illegal, but abortion rights themselves carve out exceptions to that general illegality (if it happens early enough in the pregnancy, if it is deemed medically necessary, if it is the result of illegal sex, etc). The exceptional status of abortion became inverted once more in the brief period of COVID-19 quarantine (and here, I mean the general orders in several states that shut down all normal functioning and issued stay at home orders except for “essential services”). Several states made explicit that abortion was considered an elective procedure, and so alongside reconstructive surgery, gender-affirming care, and other procedures that were understood as not necessary to sustain life, abortion was banned. In other states, abortions were deemed essential procedures. I contend that the confusion around abortion as essential or elective is not merely a sign of political opportunism to limit abortion but also expresses the deep paradox at the heart of abortion rights: those in favor of expanded abortion access characterize the procedure as standard and necessary reproductive health care as well as a radical call for gendered bodily autonomy. But the implication of necessary health care produces is the need for an authoritative judgment of medical necessity while bodily autonomy elevates subjective judgment as determinative. This paper uses the extraordinary state of quarantine to puzzle through how the paradox at the heart of abortion rights is centrally constitutive of women’s citizenship as a state of mediated belonging, where the exceptionality of the pregnant body continues to trouble the operation of individual rights.

Author

• Claire C. McKinney, William & Mary