Society Must Be Defended—from Unsafe Abortion 

Abortion is one of the safest of all medical procedures. Decades of public health scholarship demonstrates that, where it is legal, abortion is safer than childbirth. And yet, unsafe abortion remains one of the top five causes of maternal deaths worldwide. States’ continued criminalization of abortion, despite their participation in global efforts to combat unsafe abortion, is a core contradiction that this talk explores. I use Morocco as a strategically situated foothold to explore the transnational dynamics by which unsafe abortion coheres as a political discourse and target of intervention. 

In Morocco, depoliticizing the downstream consequences of abortion’s criminalization as areas for harm reduction allows multiple actors with competing interests to hasten to their rescue. By recruiting the state as a defender of women’s health and rights, for example, politicians avoid criticizing the state’s primary, fundamental role in making abortion unsafe. Focusing on unsafe abortion thus allows governments and politicians to champion women’s health while refusing to take the most meaningful step towards ensuring abortion’s safety: legalization. 

Jessica Marie Newman is a Visiting Assistant Professor of Feminist, Gender, & Sexuality Studies and a Visiting Scholar in Anthropology at Cornell University.

Jess Marie Newman is a feminist medical anthropologist working in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA). Dr. Newman is chiefly interested in reproduction, care provision, activism, media, post-coloniality, and the state. Dr. Newman's expertise includes anthropology of the MENA, gender and sexuality including feminist and queer theory, critical medical anthropology, and social movement research. Dr. Newman's work has focused on the dynamics of care seeking and activism surrounding stigmatized reproduction in Morocco, including single motherhood and abortion.

Her first book manuscript, Unsafe: Deserving Abortion in Morocco, is currently in preparation. The book explores abortion activism and care in Morocco, unraveling how international media and pressure politics directly influenced abortion provision and care seeking at a local hospital stuck squarely in the limelight of Morocco’s abortion debate. Unsafe highlights the contradictions of providing and seeking abortion care in contexts where the procedure is illegal. Morocco provides the grounding case study elucidating how global abortion politics and public health agendas targeting unsafe abortion intersect with local institutions and ideologies. Through fine-grained ethnographic analysis, the book demonstrates that banning abortion, legislating abortion into inaccessibility, making medical abortion inaccessible, and criminalizing abortion seekers and providers are all ingredients in the making of unsafe abortion. In Morocco, unsafe abortion thus indexes many things: the legal vulnerability that both practitioners and patients face, encounters that expose vulnerable people to financial extortion and emotional abuse, harmful procedures performed both inside and outside of medical contexts, and political retribution for speaking out about abortion. A central aim of Unsafe is therefore to de-escalate the conversation about abortion by showing the banality of everyday abortion care and the multiple vectors of harm that restrictive laws potentiate.

Prior to joining the faculty at Cornell University, Dr. Newman was Assistant Professor of Anthropology at Temple University with appointments in Gender, Sexuality, and Women’s Studies and Global Studies. Dr. Newman was also a Lecturer in the Department of Anthropology at Yale University. Dr. Newman received her PhD in Anthropology and a graduate certificate in Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies from Yale University in 2017. Her dissertation, “Making the Mére Célibataire: NGOs, Activism, and Single Motherhood in Morocco” received the Association for Feminist Anthropology Dissertation Award.

Co-sponsored by Feminist, Gender, & Sexuality Studies.