Abortion on Borders: Roe v. Wade, Temporal Currency, and Illegal Misoprostol on the Texas-Mexico Border

• In Event: Afterlife of Precarity

Abstract

This paper focuses on how state legibility in Roe v. Wade hinges on the court’s use of justiciability doctrines to frame reproductive rights. As Texas passes stricter abortion regulations, in what ways does tension with Roe v. Wade come to bear on the present and future imaginaries of abortion access? How does the court’s distribution of “justice” produce temporalities of evidence, injury, and reproductive precarity? As illegal markets for misoprostol (the abortion pill) spread to communities excluded from access to health care along the Texas-Mexico border, this paper speaks to the ways criminality ties abortion regulation and immigration reform together.

Presenter

• Cecelia Lie, University of California at Santa Cruz, Department of Feminist Studies