transgressions
Nandagiri, R., & Pizzarossa, L. B. (2023). Transgressing biomedical and legal boundaries: The “enticing and hazardous” challenges and promises of a Self-Managed Abortion multiverse. Women's Studies International Forum (Vol. 100, p. 102799). Pergamon. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.wsif.2023.102799
The second “Lucíta Nandarossa” piece, this piece found its home in a Special Issue convened by Dr Ben Kasstan-Dabush and Prof Sheelagh McGuinness. We presented some of our initial thinking at a workshop convened by them at CHLS Bristol in October 2021.
At its core, this paper is concerned with transgression—and what self-managed abortion (SMA) does to the ways abortion is usually understood and governed. We start from the observation that abortion is still largely framed within medico-legal paradigms, where authority sits with clinicians and the state, and where decision-making is imagined as individual, bounded, and contained within formal systems.
Medical abortion pills, we argue, are more than just a reproductive technology or a method of service provision. They enable forms of abortion practice that exceed, unsettle, and rework biomedical and legal control.
Conceptually, we move beyond thinking of abortion as a single system. Instead, we argue that SMA reveals a “multiverse” of abortion practices: plural, shifting, and spanning clinical, domestic, digital, and activist spaces. Abortion is not one thing, located in one place and governed in one way; it is multiple, mobile, and constantly reconfigured through different actors, infrastructures, and forms of knowledge.
This is where the idea of transgression is so important: SMA troubles dominant paradigms in abortion research by unsettling who holds authority (clinicians vs feminist networks), what counts as legitimate knowledge, and where care can take place. At the same time, abortion remains deeply exceptionalised, such that even these shifts are often absorbed as forms of what we call “permissible transgressions”—allowed, tolerated, but still bounded and governed.
SMA, then, is both enticing and hazardous. It opens up possibilities for rethinking care, autonomy, and collective organising but it also exposes people to uneven risks, legal precarity, and abandonment by formal systems. Holding these tensions together felt important to us.
In that sense, SMA does not just extend access within existing systems; it reconfigures what counts as abortion, where it can happen, and whose knowledge and authority matter. The “multiverse” is not just descriptive; it is a way of insisting on abortion as plural, contested, and irreducible to medico-legal control. SMA, thus, represents a deliberate move towards new ways of making meaning and (re)imagining abortions.
We received very favourable reviews for this article - one reviewer suggested publishing as is, and another suggested some minor changes. Reviewer 3 was less enthused, not necessarily because they disagreed with the argument but due to more personal/political points they took issue with. We incorporated as much of their feedback as possible, but we also contest some of their points, particularly where they suggest our work was in some way “jumping on the bandwagon” of abortion. I think our collective work in this space is a strong enough refutation.