Viapolitics and the emancipatory possibilities of abortion mobilities

Abstract

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.

Abortion mobilities

“…Access to abortion is therefore not a matter of how badly someone wants or needs an abortion but their ability to move or be on the receiving end of the movement of information and things—the ability of which is affected by geographical location and forces such as white supremacy, neoliberal capitalism and anti‐genderism. It is important to understand that abortion access is ‘far from equal’ (Freeman, 2020, p. 897), and that mobilities are differentially available. Both mobility and immobility are ‘intimately’ connected with abortion access (Side, 2020, p. 16).…”

“…Abortion travel is often understood to occur when abortion is restricted or banned but it may be undertaken for a variety of social and economic factors. Abortion travel is ‘not new’ (Freeman, 2020, p. 897), but has often been the purview of abortion seekers with the financial means to travel, just as those travelling to access fertility, pregnancy and birth services. Indeed, although possible for some, travel is burdensome and can be an insurmountable barrier to abortion care.…”

“…To further examine the place‐based and global forces shaping abortion access, abortion geographers have begun to use concepts from migration and border studies to advance the framework of abortion mobilities. Freeman (2020), Engle and Freeman (2022), and Thomsen et al. (2022) use Walter's (2015) concept of ‘viapolitics’, which shifts attention to the role of vehicles, roads and routes in political studies of migration, to discuss the mobility of abortion‐seekers, providers, activists, and opponents.…”

“…(2022) use Walter's (2015) concept of ‘viapolitics’, which shifts attention to the role of vehicles, roads and routes in political studies of migration, to discuss the mobility of abortion‐seekers, providers, activists, and opponents. Freeman argues that by studying abortion from this perspective, ‘it is possible to better understand how power works and what the possibilities for political action and social justice are’ (2020, p. 906). Engle and Freeman (2022) use mobilities and viapolitics to analyse the narrative device of the ‘abortion road trip’ in fictional representations of abortion in the US.…”

“…Reproductive justice is at the heart of much of the current activism and scholarship on abortion, which seeks to situate the question of abortion access 'within a holistic analysis of people's lives that examines the political and historic circumstances in which those lives are situated' (Gomez, 2016, p. 52). 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.…”