Editor: Rachel Alpha Johnston Hurst

Proposals by: October 1, 2018

Rosalind Pollack Petchesky argued in 1987 that “feminists and other prochoice advocates have all too readily ceded the visual terrain,” abandoning the field of fetal imagery to antiabortion activists (264). She called for new fetal images that “recontextualized the fetus” (Petchesky 1987, 287). Such images would locate the fetus in a body (and a social context) outside of what Carol A. Stabile would later describe as “an inhospitable waste land, at war with the ‘innocent person’ within” that is a dominant theme in antiabortion discourse (1992, 179). Recently, Shannon Stettner wrote that although there are more ordinary stories about abortion circulating as a political response to threats to abortion access, they are typically anonymous and online, and so it remains a reality that “we are still a long way from a world in which women will not feel obliged to conceal the fact that they had an abortion” (2016, 7). Even in circumstances that support access to abortion, abortion can remain a secret: invisible and unheard.

How do we represent abortion? What work does representing abortion do? Can representing abortion challenge and change conventional reproductive rights understandings of abortion that circulate publicly? Will reclaiming representations of abortion help publicly express the “things we cannot say” about abortion from a pro-choice perspective, like grief and multiple abortions (Ludlow 2008, p. 29)? Alternatively, does taking back control of representing abortion from antiabortion activists provide a space to “celebrate” abortion as a central component of reproductive justice (Thomsen 2013, 149)? This edited collection begins from these questions to … read more and source (Web).