ESHS/HSS Annual Meeting

Embodied expertise and contested authority: feminist knowledge production in Spanish abortion trials (1970s-1980s)

• In Event: Representing Pregnancy: Science and Culture in the 20th Century 2

English Abstract

This paper examines how, in early democratic Spain, two politicised abortion trials— Bilbao (1979-1985) and Los Naranjos (1980-1994) — functioned as critical historical stages where women's bodies and reproductive agency confronted a legal system that criminalised abortion and restricted women to a prescribed reproductive role, instead placing women’s lived reproductive experiences and agency at the centre.
The analysis traces how the International Contraception, Abortiortion & Sterilisation Campaign (ICASC)—a transnational feminist network founded in 1978—actively supported providers prosecuted Spanish abortion trials through concrete international solidarity actions. These included organizing mass protests, coordinated letter-writing campaigns, and public mobilizations that contributed to the public visibility of the trials, as well as providing strong networks for women seeking abortions abroad. ICASC's coordination documents, newsletters, and reports (archived at ATRIA, Amsterdam) reflect this multifaceted support, showing how embodied knowledge rooted in women’s experiences was circulated and mobilised to challenge biomedical and legal authority over pregnancy.
The study is based on court rulings from both trials, ICASC coordination documents, newsletters, and solidarity reports (archived at ATRIA, Amsterdam) as well as oral histories of women who were prosecuted and feminist activists. These sources show how the ICASC network circulated knowledge and practices that focused on lived experience and women's collective experience as crucial tools for claiming reproductive rights. As a collective act of feminist protest, ICASC generated expert knowledge based on women's concrete realities, reproductive decision-making, and international feminist collaboration.
By framing the production of knowledge about reproduction as a historical and political practice, this study challenges universalising scientific narratives within reproductive health. It argues that abortion trials functioned as discursive spaces in which the emerging notion of reproductive rights entered public debate at a time when the concept was still being shaped and consolidated internationally. In this way, the paper contributes to multidisciplinary and interdisciplinary research on the history of reproductive health and rights, contributing to current debates surrounding access to reproductive rights.

Author

• Elisa Roncone, University of Granada