I have begun a new research project, called “Abortion on the Move: Navigating the Fractured Reproductive Healthcare Landscape,” which explores how race, class, and nationality shape abortion access in the post-Dobbs era in the United States.

Since the Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization (2022) Supreme Court ruling in the US, twenty-one states have introduced abortion restrictions or outright bans that reduce reproductive care access for all pregnant people. This has disproportionately impacted lower-income and racially marginalized women, who are both most likely to seek out abortions and face the greatest structural barriers to access. This project draws on interviews with vulnerable abortion seekers who live in states with restrictive access and analyzes three distinct pathways to care: traveling out-of-state to clinics; using telemedicine abortion medication; self-managing abortions at home with pills from a community network.

In partnership with Midwest Access Coalition, a telehealth provider, and a prominent community network, this project employs a comparative, qualitative design to determine the multiple structural, meso-level and embodied/emotional barriers that may impede abortion access, as well as mechanisms of support that may facilitate pathways to care. This research compares the experiences of lower-income and racially marginalized pregnant people to those from more privileged backgrounds, and also compares the experience of using an abortion fund, telehealth, and more informal means of accessing medication abortion.

Based on 100 interviews with abortion seekers who traveled out-of-state, 100 interviews with people who accessed abortion medication through telehealth or community networks, and 50 conversations with abortion field professionals, I argue that abortion occupies the medico-legal borderlands, where medical and criminal rationalities overlap. I analyze the nexus of state and medical control of reproduction, its reconfiguration under Dobbs, and the ways in which marginalized women forge new networks and epistemic strategies to navigate the increasingly fractured reproductive landscape.