Description

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An unprecedented, up-close look into the global self-managed abortion movement.
 
Abortion pills have made safe medication abortion possible for millions of people around the world, even in the most restrictive circumstances. In this timely book, Sydney Calkin illustrates the profound, transformative promise of these pills—which are safe, effective, and responsible for a sharp decline in maternal mortality. Abortion Pills Go Global demonstrates that the widespread practice of self-managed medication abortion makes it more difficult for countries to enforce oppressive abortion laws and less willing to do so.
 
Taking a bold and unique geographic approach, this book follows these pills as they are manufactured and transported by feminist activists from India to Ireland, Northern Ireland, Poland, and the United States. Calkin shows that the growing availability of abortion pills in places with restrictive laws means more people have access to self-managed healthcare. Abortion Pills Go Global looks ahead to see how the broader politics of abortion could shift in response to this global movement—one that looks not to laws for protection but to on-the-ground feminist mobilizations across borders.

About the Author

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Sydney Calkin is Senior Lecturer in the School of Geography at Queen Mary University of London and coeditor of After Repeal: Re-thinking Abortion Politics.

Praise For…

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"[E]ye-opening . . . Calkin’s meticulous analysis demonstrates how the technological development of these pills has led to substantial changes in the social politics of abortion around the world, due not just to their ease of use but their ease of transport. The result is an incisive look at the deeply intertwined relationship between international supply chains, local politics, underground activism, and women’s rights."
— Publishers Weekly

 "Abortion Pills Go Global: Reproductive Freedom across Borders is a compelling reminder that reproductive justice demands abortion to be autonomous, accessible, and affordable, and MA delivered through a demedicalized model advances us towards such a goal."
— Medicine, Conflict and Survival