Gestating times: women's accounts of the temporalities of pregnancies that end in abortion in England.

Siân M Beynon‐Jones

doi:10.1111/1467-9566.12522

Abstract

Tensions between the ‘clock time’ of medicine and the embodied times of its subjects are central to feminist writing concerning Western obstetric practice. In this article, I expand the focus of this literature by addressing the temporal dynamics of another site of reproductive healthcare: abortion provision. Echoing obstetric accounts of birth, time in legal, healthcare and social scientific discourse on abortion is routinely conceptualised as a finite resource contained within the pregnant/foetal body, which can be measured using clocks and calendars. I argue that women's interview accounts of their experiences of ending their pregnancies offer opportunities for critical reflection on this characterisation of pregnancy as linear ‘gestational time’. First, participants in this study re‐position the significance of gestational time by articulating its embodied meaning. Second, they provide alternative accounts of the temporality of pregnancy as a process which emerges through, and is disrupted by, the dynamics of socio‐material relations. The article considers the broader implications of women's accounts of pregnancy times for legal, healthcare and social scientific accounts of ‘later’ abortion.

Highlights

It is constructed through specific practices of measurement, ‘clock time’ – the division of time into quantifiable, reproducible units – is routinely treated ‘as time’ (Adam 1995: 25 – emphasis added)
Feminist scholarship critiques the hegemony of clock time within obstetric practice, highlighting the implications of this narrow temporal framework for women’s experiences of birth (Adam 1995, Fox 1989, Martin 1989, McCourt 2009, Simonds 2002, Thomas 1992)
A key finding is that many participants described their pregnancies in terms of the finite, and rapidly-diminishing resource of ‘gestational time’

Summary

Introduction

It is constructed through specific practices of measurement, ‘clock time’ – the division of time into quantifiable, reproducible units – is routinely treated ‘as time’ (Adam 1995: 25 – emphasis added). Fox (1989) argues that this standardisation and objectification of time is alienating for women, for whom the temporality of birth is constituted by the particular lived experience of their contractions. She suggests, it imposes an understanding of birth as a passive event whose passage can be traced in hours and minutes, as opposed to an active, time-generating process through which women transform their own identities as they birth new life (see Adam 1995).

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Conclusion