Introduction: making modern maternity

In June 2022 when the US Supreme Court overturned Roe v Wade, the 1973 case that legalised abortion across the United States, reverberations were felt across the world. Nearly overnight, more than a dozen American states implemented anti-abortion ‘trigger’ legislation (Nash and Guarnieri 2022), with some simply reverting to the 19th-century laws that first outlawed abortion and could now be reinforced again (Keveney 2022). As we write this, in spring 2024, more than half of US states either outlaw abortion entirely or place so many restrictions on access that most people who need the procedure will not be able to obtain it (Sherman et al 2024). In the US, these laws disproportionately impact Black, Indigenous and Latinx pregnant people (Human Rights Watch 2023), as well as those without the economic means to cross state lines or seek abortion pills illegally (Ali 2022). Overturning Roe has indelibly changed maternity in the United States and on a global scale, and with uneven consequences depending on geopolitical context: the American legal ruling may have prompted France to become the first country to enshrine the right to legal abortion in its constitution (Berlinger and Xu 2024); however, in Rwanda women are still jailed for having abortions; Italian gynaecologists who offer abortion experience harassment (Ferragamo 2024); and India held its first anti-abortion march last spring (Maria 2023).

As Loretta Ross and other Black and Indigenous feminist scholars have argued, abortion access must be understood as intimately connected to every aspect of reproduction and maternity (Ross 2017; Gurr 2015). In a reproductive justice framework, they posit, the right not to have a child is inextricably linked with the right to have a child. Additionally, the rights to birth and parent children in safe, clean and healthy environments and to be assured of bodily autonomy …