COVID-19 & Structural Violence
Nandagiri, R., Coast, E., & Strong, J. (2020). COVID-19 and Abortion: Making Structural Violence Visible. International Perspectives on Sexual and Reproductive Health,46(Supplement 1), 83-89. https://doi.org/10.1363/46e1320
This was a long time percolating. Professor Coast, Joe, & I were discussing a number of ideas and framing concepts when “structural violence” came up. We were all struck by it and felt there was something to say, but we parked it for a rainy day.
I first encountered the concept of structural violence while doing my MA in Peace and Conflict Studies, in a course taught by Prof Johan Galtung. I remember being fascinated by it, but also struggling to fully grasp it. It feels slightly surreal that, years later, I am not only working with the concept but also trying to extend it into the context of abortion and sexual and reproductive health.
It also led to this amusing exchange on Twitter:
Writing this piece together was a real joy. Co-authoring with my former supervisor (and now colleague) and a dear collaborator was a genuinely generative experience, not just in terms of ideas, but in how I came to think about writing itself. There is something quite special about writing together in real time, where a tentative “expand on this” becomes something clearer, sharper, and often better than you imagined.
At its core, this paper asks what it means to understand abortion during COVID-19 through the lens of structural violence. Many of the early discussions framed the pandemic as disrupting access: closing clinics, restricting movement, and creating logistical barriers. While all of this is true, we argue that it does not go far enough.
Conceptually, the paper argues that COVID-19 did not simply create new barriers to abortion, but made visible the structural violence that has always shaped access to care. Legal restrictions, fragile health systems, economic precarity, and social inequalities were already producing harm: what the pandemic did was intensify these conditions and render them more visible.
Structural violence, in this sense, allows us to see that these harms are not incidental or accidental. They are built into systems, produced through policy, governance, and inequality; and disproportionately borne by those already marginalised.
In that sense, the pandemic becomes less a moment of disruption and more a moment of revelation. It exposes how abortion access is structured by broader conditions of inequality and governance, rather than simply determined by availability or individual choice.
It felt especially meaningful to publish this piece in International Perspectives on Sexual and Reproductive Health—a journal that has been home to so much important and definitive work in abortion and SRH. Not only was this article part of an abortion supplement, but it was published in the journal’s final issue.
We began writing the article before we knew the journal would be closing. There is something bittersweet about that: that this piece sits alongside so much significant scholarship, even as the field loses an important publishing space, particularly for work from the Global South.
It is a loss that will be keenly felt.