Abstract
Globally, abortion has largely been understood, researched, and regulated within a medico-legal paradigm. However, self-managed abortion (SMA) questions the centrality of the law and bio-medical paradigms, as well as the presumed individuality of abortion decision-making that it is predicated on. SMA offers an “enticing and hazardous” (Donnan & Magowan, 2009, p. 9) challenge to traditional legal and biomedical understandings of and approaches to abortion, as well as to social, religious, (pro)creative conventions. In this paper, we detail how abortion remains exceptionalised, setting conditions for “permissible transgressions”. We explore how SMA fundamentally challenges and alters meanings of abortion, and its care and provision: from whose authority and knowledge is valued and centred, to the environments that abortion is possible in, to issuing a broader challenge around how abortion itself is understood and depicted, and how SMA, thus, represents a deliberate move towards new ways of making meaning and (re)imagining abortions.
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