Sometimes It’s a Child and a Choice: Toward an Embodied Abortion Praxis

Feminist analyses of recent abortion politics in the United States note that the “abortion debate” has settled into a system of dichotomies, such as the dichotomy between women’s autonomy on the abortion rights side and the value of unborn life on the anti-abortion side. This article posits that these dichotomizations contribute to the erosion of women’s access and rights to abortion through loss of credibility for abortion rights discourse and loss of access to abortion praxis that can handle more complex situations. Maintenance of the dichotomies requires denial or erasure of more complicated situations, like late-second-trimester abortion and situations in which women grieve their aborted fetuses. Drawing on her experiences working in an abortion clinic, the author argues that a more complete consideration of these more complex abortion experiences could interrupt the erosion of our reproductive rights