Title: Abortion Mobilities: Travel and transport for reproductive rights across Latin America
Funder: Economic and Social Research Council

Abstract: The right to access safe abortion is a highly divisive global issue. Laws prohibit abortion by request in the majority of the world and countries such as the United States are implementing increasingly restrictive laws. It is therefore imperative that we better understand why these restrictions exist, how they affect those in need of healthcare, and how they have been contested. I will examine these questions through the first study on abortion travel to focus on the Global South. While almost all unsafe abortions and deaths from unsafe abortions occur in the Global South, scholarship on abortion travel has overwhelmingly focused on the Global North (Sethna and Davis 2019). Through examining the barriers that prevent women from accessing safe abortions and the strategies they devise to resist these barriers, I will explore how women's bodies and movement have been regulated by law and how this results in the mobility of women and abortion medication. During fieldwork in Mexico, Peru, and Guatemala I will analyse policy and legal documents and conduct interviews with reproductive health organisations, activists, and women who have traveled for abortions or transported abortion medication. This research will bring together legal geographies, critical health scholarship, and a mobilities perspective to explore how legal and extra-legal barriers impact the reproductive health of Latin American women and the mobilities they instigate in pursuit of abortion healthcare. This will notably be through my implementation of 'feminist geolegalities' (Brickell and Cuomo 2019) and 'viapolitics' (Walters 2015). Feminist geolegalities will be used as a framework to analyse how law and power impact women's bodies through the prohibition of abortion but also how such attacks are resisted. This resistance will be understood through viapolitics, which has previously been used to politicise the roles of vehicles and routes in migration studies. I will apply it here to recentre how women make journeys for abortions in terms of the vehicles, networks, and infrastructure involved and how abortion medications are transported. This will make an important contribution to reproductive health studies by focusing on the spatial enactment of abortion politics and law. Moreover, I will be working with reproductive health organisations to draw up policy briefs that will be shared with influential lobbyists, lawmakers, and activist organisations. This research will be conducted through the following aims: 1) To explore how governmental regimes and non-legislative barriers prohibit safe, legal abortions in Latin America. 2) To understand how pregnant women and activists devise strategies, form networks, and resist these barriers to seek reproductive healthcare through travel and the transportation of abortion medication. 3) To highlight women's experiences of being forced to undertake travel in search of abortions and use their testimonies for change. These aims will interrogate how a safe and common medical procedure is politicised and made inaccessible or dangerous for women with clear geographical disparities in safety. It is important to understand how legislation comes into being and how it is contested because it is the interpretation of the law that either restricts or expands abortion access in Latin America (McReynolds-Pérez 2017). Abortion legislation is highly uneven spatially but there are also numerous non-legislative barriers that prevent women from accessing abortion in practice (Pruitt and Vanegas 2015). The research will examine the strategies that emerge to cope with these barriers with a focus on travel and abortion trails (Calkin & Freeman 2018). These strategies consist of activist networks, abortion hotlines (Drovetta 2015), activist boats (Gomperts 2002), and individual approaches. This project seeks to understand how abortion mobilities are practiced and will lead to vital theoretical scholarship and policy interventions.

Lay abstract: Abortion is a routine and safe medical procedure when administered in the correct environment. However, all too often, the law and other barriers prevent women from accessing safe abortions where they are. Across Latin America such barriers are common and this means that travel is often the only way for women to access abortions. While some have the option of travelling to a country or city where the procedure is legal, for others the only option is to find an illegal, unsafe abortion. There is also a growing trend of transporting abortion medication to women directly in order to prevent them from traveling themselves. Access is profoundly geographical with almost all unsafe abortions occurring in the Global South, and with a high proportion in Latin America. In this research project I will be examining the experiences of Latin American women who are forced to travel across borders for abortion care or transport abortion medication due to barriers preventing them from receiving care close to home. It will be exploring the barriers that prevent women from receiving safe, legal abortions in three countries in Latin America (Mexico, Peru, and Guatemala) and the strategies they devise to resist these barriers to seek reproductive healthcare through travel. The abortions women find on their travels may not be safe; women can face death, long-term health issues, or imprisonment as a result. But they often have no other option. The strategies to provide abortion access and to raise awareness include abortion hotlines, boats that sail women into international waters where they can escape the national law of their country, and activist networks that transport abortion medication. These tactics help women to travel to find an abortion or deliver the abortion pills to them. I will conduct this research by undertaking fieldwork in Mexico, Peru, and Guatemala where I will interview reproductive health organisations and women who have travelled for abortions and analyse legal and policy documents to understand the 'official' barriers in place. This research is important because I will be working alongside reproductive health organisations in Latin America and my findings will be used by them to inform their work on reproductive health. While the phenomenon of abortion travel has been studied in the Global North, it is significantly under-researched in the Global South, despite this being where the majority of unsafe abortion travel occurs. I will therefore provide evidence of the phenomenon of abortion travel in Latin America, provide witness to the experiences of the women who are forced to travel for abortions, explore how the transportation of abortion medication works, and interrogate why and how barriers to safe abortion exist. This is for the clear purpose of working towards the removal of these barriers. I will write for academic audiences but I will also be working with women and activists to write policy briefs about the phenomenon of abortion travel, make a short film about women's experiences of travel, and a graphic novella to raise awareness of abortion access in Latin America.

Research activity codes: 8.1 ORGANISATION AND DELIVERY OF SERVICES;8.3 POLICY, ETHICS AND RESEARCH GOVERNANCE
Health categories: REPRODUCTIVE HEALTH AND CHILDBIRTH