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Viapolitics and the emancipatory possibilities of abortion mobilities

Scholarship on abortion travel has examined the places women travel between and why such journeys are necessary. However, there has been scant attention paid to the journeys themselves and how these journeys are undertaken. This paper uses William Walters’ notion of ‘viapolitics’ to better attend to...

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Detalles Bibliográficos
Autor principal: Freeman, Cordelia
Formato: Online Artículo Texto
Lenguaje:English
Publicado: 2020
Materias:
Acceso en línea:https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7612045/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/34849148
http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/17450101.2020.1803588
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author Freeman, Cordelia
author_facet Freeman, Cordelia
author_sort Freeman, Cordelia
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description Scholarship on abortion travel has examined the places women travel between and why such journeys are necessary. However, there has been scant attention paid to the journeys themselves and how these journeys are undertaken. This paper uses William Walters’ notion of ‘viapolitics’ to better attend to how people travel by focussing on the role of vehicles in abortion politics. This takes three parts: an exploration of the emotional and embodied journeys that women have to take to access abortions; the role of the vehicle as a site of political activism around abortion rights; and the transportation of abortion medication. Viapolitics has to date only been used within migration politics but as this paper shows, it has utility beyond this field to interrogate abortion travels and highlight the role of vehicles in abortion access as well as to explore how abortion transport can be emancipatory for women. This paper furthers viapolitics by arguing that we need to consider the journeys of ‘things’ and not just people. In the case of abortion access, it is the transportation of abortion medication rather than the travel of women that is the most socially just solution to discriminatory laws and extra-legal barriers.
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spelling pubmed-76120452021-11-29 Viapolitics and the emancipatory possibilities of abortion mobilities Freeman, Cordelia Mobilities Article Scholarship on abortion travel has examined the places women travel between and why such journeys are necessary. However, there has been scant attention paid to the journeys themselves and how these journeys are undertaken. This paper uses William Walters’ notion of ‘viapolitics’ to better attend to how people travel by focussing on the role of vehicles in abortion politics. This takes three parts: an exploration of the emotional and embodied journeys that women have to take to access abortions; the role of the vehicle as a site of political activism around abortion rights; and the transportation of abortion medication. Viapolitics has to date only been used within migration politics but as this paper shows, it has utility beyond this field to interrogate abortion travels and highlight the role of vehicles in abortion access as well as to explore how abortion transport can be emancipatory for women. This paper furthers viapolitics by arguing that we need to consider the journeys of ‘things’ and not just people. In the case of abortion access, it is the transportation of abortion medication rather than the travel of women that is the most socially just solution to discriminatory laws and extra-legal barriers. 2020 2020-08-06 /pmc/articles/PMC7612045/ /pubmed/34849148 http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/17450101.2020.1803588 Text en https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/) ), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.
spellingShingle Article
Freeman, Cordelia
Viapolitics and the emancipatory possibilities of abortion mobilities
title Viapolitics and the emancipatory possibilities of abortion mobilities
title_full Viapolitics and the emancipatory possibilities of abortion mobilities
title_fullStr Viapolitics and the emancipatory possibilities of abortion mobilities
title_full_unstemmed Viapolitics and the emancipatory possibilities of abortion mobilities
title_short Viapolitics and the emancipatory possibilities of abortion mobilities
title_sort viapolitics and the emancipatory possibilities of abortion mobilities
topic Article
url https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7612045/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/34849148
http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/17450101.2020.1803588
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