Since 1989 abortion in Chile has been illegal in every single circumstance. This means that tens of thousands of women every year undergo clandestine abortions at great risk to their health. Class directly influences Chilean women's relationships to abortion; wealthier women can pay for the confidentiality of a safe doctor whereas poorer women cannot. There is just one region where women regardless of class can easily travel to another country in search of abortions, Arica in northern Chile. This paper considers the previously unstudied phenomenon whereby women cross the border quickly and cheaply from northern Chile to the Peruvian city of Tacna where numerous clinics offer the procedure. This paper utilises Foucault's concept of biopolitics to trace how women are forced to cross a border to avoid government legislation and finds that even by leaving the territory of the state, women do not fully leave state control. Despite the lack of official statistics, interviews with healthworkers and a young woman who made the crossing show that abortion border crossings do occur and this paper reflects on the legal, safety, and biopolitical ramifications of these journeys for Chilean women.
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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.
Triangulation is increasingly being seen as a concept that has lost clarity and become too broad to be of use. A new language is required to explain how and why researchers bring together multiple perspectives to study phenomena. By drawing on my own research experiences I propose 'collage' as a framework for using multiple methods in geography. This framework differs from triangulation in two important ways: firstly, it brings multiple methods together to elucidate a broad research area rather than a precise one, and secondly, it allows for greater spontaneity and the shifting of the frame of research. This paper explains how multiple methods can be used to gather fragments of knowledge on a topic that, when pieced together, can create a more complex understanding of the wider research area. A focus on this process emphasizes the role of the researcher in putting the pieces together.
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