When: Monday, May 22, 2023, 12:00 PM - 2:00 PMWhere: Online
The overturning of Roe v Wade’s constitutional right to abortion in Dobbs has shown how fragile legal protections for pregnant people can be. Nonetheless Argentina, Australia and Ireland (north and south) are among the countries pushing back against the reproductive injustice of disrespecting pregnant knowledge of life and removing legal barriers to abortion. Over 50 years of abortion’s public health provision in Britain has generated unequal terrain for abortion seekers as criminalisation continues to hang over those least able to access abortion and medical decision-making authority remains in place. In these circumstances it seems important to challenge ‘new’ calls to ‘protect foetal life’ after #Dobbs and to demand instead respect for the creative work of reproductive life. Growing embryos and foetuses into children is intimate body-work, work which needs to be supported, and sometimes withdrawn. There is much to be learned from the different ways that lawyers, law students and everyday legal workers have engaged with this uneven global terrain in supporting women, girls and pregnant people in the struggle to make themselves free. From streets to parliaments, kitchens to courts, abortion-seekers, advocates and activists have generated new visual and verbal knowledges for representing the everyday creative work of making legal space for reproductive life, including by becoming unpregnant. These roundtables seek to share and expand that space by talking about how public legal education - including university classrooms, law clinics, social justice lawyering, and community organising - could best respond to the challenges and creativities of our reproductive times.
In this month of May, and on the fifth anniversary of #Repealedthe8th, we pay tribute to all the reproductive workers around the world and to all the creative and committed activity that seeks to reproduce law otherwise. We reflect on support for all those whose everyday reproductive actions, including becoming unpregnant, make the world live!
Organisers: Ruth Fletcher, Leverhulme Research Fellow, QMUL Centre for Law and Society in a Global Context; Catherine Conlon, Reproductive Citizenship Project, School of Social Work and Social Policy, Trinity College Dublin; Matt Evans and Gbemisola Obolo, QMUL Legal Advice Centre.
Catherine Conlon (chair) is Associate Professor of Social Studies, Trinity College Dublin, Principal Investigator of the Reproductive Citizenship Project, co-author of the UnPAC study (pdf), and academic advisor to the O’Shea operational review of Ireland’s abortion law (2023).
Barbara Baird is Associate Professor in Women’s and Gender Studies, Flinders University, author of the forthcoming history of abortion provision in Australia Abortion Care is Health Care, and co-convenor of South Australian Abortion Action Coalition where abortion was decriminalised in 2021.
Erica Millar is a DECRA Research Fellow working on institutional abortion stigma, author of Happy Abortions, and a lecturer in the School of Crime, Justice and Legal Studies, La Trobe University.
Kate Antosik-Parsons is a Post-Doctoral Research Fellow in the School of Social Studies, Trinity College Dublin, an art historian and a visual artist, and a past organiser with the Dublin Bay North Repeal the Eighth campaign.
Maeve Taylor is Director of Advocacy and Communications at the Irish Family Planning Association, the leading provider of sexual and reproductive health services in Ireland, and a published human rights practitioner.
Paola Bergallo is Associate Professor in the School of Law at the Universidad Torcuato di Tella, author of publications on public health, gender justice and reproductive rights, including El Aborto en America Latina (2018), and advocate in the 2021 legalisation of abortion in Argentina.
**Please note joining details will be sent the day before the event
A hybrid version of this workshop will be held later on 22 May at 6-8 PM. This will include Caoilfhionn Gallagher, Emma Campbell, Máiréad Enright, Sabrina Germain, Sandra Duffy.