Bans Off Our Bodies NYC. May 14, 2022. Photo by Rhododendrites, CC BY-SA 4.0.

On June 24, 2022 in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, a conservative supermajority of the US Supreme Court overturned the court’s rulings in Roe v. Wade (1973) and Planned Parenthood v. Casey (1992), disregarding 49 years of US legal precedent recognizing abortion as a medical procedure protected from “interference by the State” under a Constitutional right to privacy. The legal implications of this ruling, and the cultural and political responses it provokes, will continue to unfold for years, even generations, to come: as Laura Briggs (2017) instructs, all politics have become reproductive politics. At this critical moment of upheaval, anthropologists have much to say about how the United States got here, where it may be headed, and how the US case looks and resonates elsewhere in the world. Joining theory with comparative insights from both longitudinal and recent fieldwork, contributors to this Hot Spots series demonstrate the centrality of abortion to the anthropological project of understanding human lives and experiences.

Posts in This Series

After Roe: Introduction

After Roe: Introduction

On June 24, 2022, the conservative majority of the United States Supreme Court released a stunning decision in the case Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organiza... More

Stratifications of Queer Families after Roe

Stratifications of Queer Families after Roe

“We’re making plans to leave.” The voice of my dear friend—family, really—in California had a somber tone, just days after the Dobbs decision. These calls had b... More

Stratified Reproduction and Prenatal Genetics in a Post-Roe United States

Stratified Reproduction and Prenatal Genetics in a Post-Roe United States

The American College of Obstetrics and Gynecology recommends that all pregnant individuals be offered fetal genetic tests, including ultrasound, serum screening... More

Dobbs Is a Disaster for Disability Justice

Dobbs Is a Disaster for Disability Justice

Historically, the disability rights and pro-life movements have produced some strange bedfellows. Antiabortion advocates often appeal to the value of disabled l... More

What Is “Life” in Dobbs v. Jackson Women's Health Organization?

What Is “Life” in Dobbs v. Jackson Women's Health Organization?

“What is life?” is a question recurrent in biology. In his 1944 book of that title, Erwin Schrödinger hypothesized that vitality might be carried by an aperiodi... More

War on Hunger, War on Women: Anti-Abortion Politics in Nutrition Science and Policy

War on Hunger, War on Women: Anti-Abortion Politics in Nutrition Science and Policy

“If women have control over if and when they have children, we will see fewer hungry children.” I heard this call for reproductive justice from a Guatemalan ai... More

The ART of Antiabortion Activism

The ART of Antiabortion Activism

The conservative majority’s ruling in the US Supreme Court case Dobbs v. Jackson Women's Health Organization to rescind fifty years of constitutionally protecte... More

Coloniality and Reproductive Coercion in Puerto Rico in Light of the End of Roe v. Wade

Coloniality and Reproductive Coercion in Puerto Rico in Light of the End of Roe v. Wade

Currently, Puerto Rico is technically unaffected by the overturning of Roe v. Wade. The Puerto Rican Supreme Court ruling in The People of Puerto Rico v. Pablo ... More

Native American Women Are the Canaries in the Coal Mines

Native American Women Are the Canaries in the Coal Mines

The last week of June—after the overturn of Roe v. Wade—as I sat in my employer-mandated active shooter training, it was explained to me how I could fight for m... More

What Our 6-Year Research about Travel Across Borders for Abortion Care Tells Us: It’s Not a Solution

What Our 6-Year Research about Travel Across Borders for Abortion Care Tells Us: It’s Not a Solution

The US Supreme Court’s Dobbs v. Jackson Women's Health Organization decision reversing the right to abortion is devastating for women and pregnant people, and a... More

Roe, Repeal, and Playing the Long Game

Roe, Repeal, and Playing the Long Game

This year’s annual Rally for Life in Dublin occurred just one week after news broke in the United States that Roe v. Wade was overturned. Despite having no dire... More

“It’s Part of Reproductive Life”: Lessons from the Irish Abortion Rights Movement on the Importance of “Ordinary” Stories

“It’s Part of Reproductive Life”: Lessons from the Irish Abortion Rights Movement on the Importance of “Ordinary” Stories

My biggest issue was the centering of the fatal fetal anomaly cases. There was no space for someone to say, “I just didn’t want to be pregnant” or “I already ha... More

Abortion, You Betcha!

Abortion, You Betcha!

Shortly after Donald Trump was elected president in 2016, I contributed a piece to a Hot Spots forum examining The Rise of Trumpism. I wrote that “I remain puzz... More

Abortion Hope, Abortion Despair: Perspectives from Chile

Abortion Hope, Abortion Despair: Perspectives from Chile

Over the past six years, the abortion rights landscapes of Chile and the United States have moved in opposite directions with incredible speed and magnitude. In... More

Between Care and Crime

Between Care and Crime

On a blustery afternoon in the suburbs of Belo Horizonte, Brazil, the ding, ding, ding of Sofia’s phone filled the sleepy room. She opened the screen and furrow... More

Mifepristone Politics

Mifepristone Politics

After Roe, after the intensification of abortion restrictions in the United States, it is more important than ever that scholars and activists both critically r... More

Tracing the Life of Evidence: Abortion and Maternal Mortality in the Post-Dobbs Era

Tracing the Life of Evidence: Abortion and Maternal Mortality in the Post-Dobbs Era

The disparity between abortion and childbirth safety is not surprising. Pregnancies ending in abortion are substantially shorter than those ending in childbirth... More

The Post-Roe Time Warp

The Post-Roe Time Warp

On December 3, 2021, abortion activists staged a direct action outside of the Supreme Court of the United States (SCOTUS) protesting the imminent overturning of... More

“The Emergency Is Not Yet Here, but the Work Is”: Mobilizing Community for the Patchwork of Abortion Access after Roe

“The Emergency Is Not Yet Here, but the Work Is”: Mobilizing Community for the Patchwork of Abortion Access after Roe

A week after the Supreme Court released the Dobbs decision, thirty-three of us packed into a small library in our rural college town’s new queer-friendly safe s... More