Abstract This poetic/critical piece offers an urgent reflection on nine criminal prosecutions for suspected ‘illegal’ abortion in England that occurred between 2012 and 2025. Drawing on published traces of the cases, including sentencing remarks, appeal decisions and media reports, this essay-meditation evokes the haunting, suffocation and cruelty imposed by the criminalisation of abortion. In paying attention to plot and the discursive violence of this particular legal framing, this piece applies creative writing methods to provoke a destabilising, denaturalising, twisting, deplotting, dismantling and undoing, in a project of reproductive justice, abolition and liberation. CONTENT WARNING: This piece contains distressing content taken directly from prosecutions and trials, including references to abortion, stillbirth, infant death, murder, domestic violence.

Abstract While South Africa formally recognises the rights of LGBTQ persons, there is ongoing marginalisation and discrimination of and violence against such individuals. What is at stake here is not simply a matter of the legal recognition of LGBTQ rights, but rather a matter of the recognition of the identities and equal dignity of LGBTQ individuals. Cornell and Murphy suggest that recognition of marginalised identities and equal dignity stem from a demand for the freedom to imagine, rework, and shape one’s own identifications—a freedom which is often not afforded to LGBTQ individuals within South Africa. Drawing on Cornell and Murphy’s notion of multiculturalism and an ethics of identification, this paper posits that despite the formal legal recognition of the rights of LGBTQ groups and individuals, without a rearticulation of the notion of identity, such groups and individuals will continue to live without equal dignity and without the social, symbolic, and material consequences associated with being ‘legitimate’ members of the nation.

Abstract This article applies the interconnected frameworks of reproductive justice and disability justice to the issue of abortion on the grounds of foetal disability. There have been recent claims as to the discriminatory nature of the foetal impairment ground included within UK abortion law, feeding into the perception of abortion rights as incompatible with disability rights. I draw upon scholarship from the US context to argue that access to abortion is part of a broader social justice agenda, which includes reproductive and disability justice. Thus, this article challenges this idea of incompatibility and considers what is required to work towards reproductive and disability justice in the context of abortion and foetal disability in the UK.