ABSTRACT
Representing Abortion aims to challenge the centring of fetal images in popular understandings of abortion, and to inspire new arguments that resonate with a wider range of abortion experiences. The introduction to the book offers a brief discussion of feminist theories of representation before discussing feminist scholarship on the public and private use of fetal images. Next, it discusses the importance of a reproductive justice framework, which positions abortion within a broader analysis of oppression that centres bodily sovereignty and resists the often racist and colonial underpinnings of reproductive rights arguments that focus on individual choice. Reproductive justice scholarship and activism has informed much of the contemporary scholarship on abortion, which includes considerations of abortion storytelling and narratives, particularly online and through social media; abortion as a subject in artistic and literary works; current and past struggles for safe abortion access; national and transnational contexts of abortion access; legal dimensions of abortion access; insights on abortion by providers; and the changing anti-abortion movement. Finally, a careful discussion of how these streams of thought merge together with the analyses of abortion representations in the collection situates the contributions thematically throughout all four sections of the book.
