precarity & pills

Nandagiri, R., Coast, E., Strong, J., Footman, K., Berro Pizzarossa, L., Wenham, C., & Jelinska, K. (2025). Precarity and pills in a pandemic: Online abortion care-seeking in Poland during COVID-19. SSM – Qualitative Research in Health, 8, Article 100663. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ssmqr.2025.100663

We first started working on this project in April 2020, just as the world went into lockdown. We worked with our comrades at Women Help Women to decide on how data would be collected and what the parameters were (within their existing consultation structure).

Data were/are absolutely devastating to read. We were extremely lucky to work with Maria Lewandowska who translated with so much care and thoughtfulness - it has shaped how we approached our corpus.

Thinking with Butler and trying to engage with this idea of liveability (what makes life liveable?) has been a profoundly moving project for me, and one that will continue to shape my thinking on abortion and reproduction. It has pushed me to be more precise in my approach to abortion, to confront how it is always entangled in the conditions that shape what life is and could be and might (never) be.

What this paper tries to do, conceptually, is to break from understanding abortion primarily in terms of access or rights. Instead, we argue that abortion decision-making under pandemic conditions is structured by precarity—material, relational, and affective—and by forms of structural violence that shape what becomes possible, necessary, or liveable. The pandemic did not simply make abortion harder to access; it reorganised the conditions under which decisions were made.

Across the data, what is visible is how multiple forms of precarity—job loss, financial insecurity, the collapse of support networks, enforced proximity, the risk of violence—converge and intensify. Rather than background conditions, they are constitutive of how decisions take form. Moments of decision emerge not gradually but often as something like a cliff edge—where accumulated pressures, vulnerabilities, and uncertainties make certain futures impossible to sustain. This is where abortion allows those possibilities to breathe, makes lives and possible futures tenable again.

Working on this project during the pandemic, and alongside such generous collaborators, reinforced for me the importance of thinking collectively—about knowledge production, about care, and about the conditions that make both possible. I am also so grateful to get to think with my wonderful co-authors and researchers - what a community to count as mine.