To recognize the tyranny of distance: A spatial reading of Whole Woman’s Health v. Hellerstedt

Abstract

Distance-physical, material distance-is an obviously spatial concept, but one rarely engaged by legal or feminist geographers. We take up this oversight in relation to the 2016 U.S. Supreme Court decision in Whole Woman's Health v. Hellerstedt, which adjudicated the constitutionality of a Texas law that imposed new regulations on abortion providers. Because half of the state's abortion providers were unable to meet these regulations and thus closed, the distance that many Texas women had to travel for abortion services increased dramatically. In part because of these increases, the Supreme Court ultimately determined that the Texas laws imposed an unconstitutional "undue burden." Bringing together case law and ethnographic data, this article traces the process by which distance is made legally "legible" in the context of reproductive in/justice. In so doing, it confronts more uneasy realities of distance, including the discursive dismissal of social and literal im/mobility and isolation; contradictory readings of "emptiness"; and the material

Legal geographies of medication abortion in the USA

“…Abortion's spatiality is co‐constituted by legal and geographical forces that cannot be separated or put into a conceptual hierarchy. To take two examples: Lisa Pruitt's work uses a space‐in‐law approach to examine conceptions of rural and urban space in the Whole Woman's Health v. Hellerstedt decision, while Katherine Side uses a law‐in‐space approach to map the spatial ramifications of the Irish 2018 abortion law (Side, 2020; Statz & Pruitt, 2019). This paper takes inspiration from the latter approach, law‐in‐space, to question how law, legislation, judgements, and legal practices “contribute to the shaping and reshaping of the spatialities of social life” in the context of mifepristone laws (Delaney, 2003, p. 68).…”

“…At issue is the geography of Iowa's abortion clinics and the permissible distance between Iowan women and abortion clinics. As Lisa Pruitt has demonstrated, courts frequently fail to account for the way that travel distances translate into concrete and cumulative socio‐economic obstacles on abortion access (Pruitt & Vanegas, 2015; Statz & Pruitt, 2019). Courts tend to exhibit a “spatial privilege” in which they treat rural people as “constitutionally insignificant” (Pruitt & Vanegas, 2015, pp.…”

“…Geographical examination of abortion has mostly concentrated on cross-border abortion travel to explore the interplay of gender, citizenship, reproductive health, and border politics (Freeman, 2017;Gilmartin & Kennedy, 2018;Sethna & Davis, 2019). Law and geography scholars have productively theorised the spatiality of abortion law, highlighting the intersection of race, class, and rurality in the geography of abortion access (Huddleston, 2015;Pruitt, 2007Pruitt, , 2008 and examining courts' tendency to reproduce inequalities in abortion access by disregarding the barriers faced by rural people (Pruitt & Vanegas, 2015;Statz & Pruitt, 2019). Abortion clinics and their contested spatiality have been used to consider the limits of free expression in the public sphere (Mitchell, 2005;Zick, 2009) and the design of clinic spaces that mediate between patients and protestors (Brown, 2013).…”

Abortion mobilities

“…The outsourcing of abortion care (Kelly, 2016), such as in the case of Ireland to England (Ergas, 2016), requires freedom of movement and the right to travel-an 'exclusion/expulsion' that criminalises abortion, enforces mobility, and absolves states 'from the responsibility for the act of abortion' (Kelly & Tuszynski, 2016;Mecinska et al, 2020, p. 401). Scholars recognise that there is stigma associated with this enforced travel and that it operates as a hard barrier to access (Erdman, 2016;Pruitt & Vanegas, 2014;Statz & Pruitt, 2019). That women and pregnant people must travel long distances to access abortion care is a 'private burden they must bear, not a public responsibility of the state' (Kelly, 2016, p. 35).…”

“…Abortion geographers draw on reproductive justice to move discussions of abortion access beyond questions of its legality (Thomsen et al, 2022), and to question whether abortion travel can accurately be described as a 'choice' (Freeman, 2020;Kelly, 2016). Moreover, legal geographers have employed reproductive justice to consider abortion regulations and the 'more intricate and often "invisible" realities of gender, poverty, rurality, and immigration status, as well as the intersections among these' (Statz & Pruitt, 2019, p. 1107. However, as reproductive justice arose in response to the white feminist movement's exclusive focus on abortion rights, there is a potential dissonance between advancing geographical understanding of abortion while also ensuring that abortion is not examined within a vacuum or to the neglect of other issues.…”