When: Monday, October 9, 2023, 3:00 PM - 6:00 PM
Where: Room 313, Third Floor, School of Law, Queen Mary University of London, Mile End Road, London E1 4NS

A thinkery for approaching time-limited abortion law as a collection of lively materials for reproducing time otherwise in the struggle for social justice.

Speakers to include: Erica Millar (La Trobe University), Joanna Erdman (Dalhousie University), Tanzil Chowdhury (Queen Mary), Sarah Keenan (Birkbeck), Giulia Zanini (University of Venice) and Ruth Fletcher (Queen Mary). Contact r.fletcher@qmul.ac.uk for more information.

Time-limited abortion laws are generating trouble around the world as they distinguish between good and bad reproductive subjects in terms of temporality and timeliness. The question of who is allowed to make themselves free of gestational labour is being answered by legal and policy criteria which prioritise ‘earliness’, and discipline ‘lateness’, with classed, racialised and ableist effects. Abortion stigma is re-arranged and associated more intensely with ‘later’ abortions, irrespective of the pregnant person’s need to be relieved of pregnancy. In the meantime, abortion support networks get on with the work of ‘reproducing otherwise’ by redeploying feminist time and energy towards the making of cross-border spaces for the care of reproductive self-managers.

These happenings raise important questions for reproductive justice and how abortion law holds traces of struggle over reproductive labour time in the production of life. But time limited laws also speak to conversations about how modern societies are accelerating unevenly in their depletion of bodies, land and environment, and to the need to recognise and redistribute the care labour that goes into making productive time possible. Thinking with other literatures about time could contribute to further fleshing out of the concept and practice of reproductive justice.

In hosting this thinkery, we want to make space for reflecting on different approaches to time-limited abortion law and for generating further questions about untimely material depletion of reproductive bodies and the atmospheric temporalities which make our legal worlds. In what ways have struggles over abortion been generative in throwing up everyday legal materials for polytemporalities that could be reproduced otherwise? If land title registries are time machines that erase history and the past investments of indigenous people in their land, could we imagine, and craft, less machine-like tools for freeing embodied labour time? How might abortion law provide an archive or a collection of lively materials for feminist and other repurposing of the world’s time?

Thanks to the Living Well with the Dead collective at University College Cork, Ireland for sharing the concept and practice of the thinkery as an adaptation of Ivan Illich’s ‘search for surprise’.

Supported by the Centre for Law and Society in a Global Context and the Leverhulme Trust.