The medical consultation as a site for governing abortion

Abstract

Australian abortion law channels abortion seekers into consultations with medical professionals. This article draws on clinical guidelines on abortion care to analyse three features of the medical consultation: counselling, contraceptive counselling, and dating ultrasounds. Reading clinical guidelines as a means by which the state attempts to enrol medical professionals into systems of governance, it argues that the medical consultation is a site at which abortion seekers are incited to think, feel and act according to norms of gender that naturalise parenthood and birth for pregnant people as well as the biopolitical aim to increase the use of contraception to reduce abortions. Norms of the medical consultation are productive of abortion exceptionalism and decentre the needs, authority and embodied experiences of abortion seekers. After unpacking how these norms circulate in clinical guidelines on abortion care, this article turns briefly to an alternative model of care developed in self-managed abortion activist scholarship. This model underlines the regulatory norms currently embedded within medical consultations while also providing a pathway through which they can be reconfigured to better centre and support abortion seekers.

Keywords: Abortion; contraception counselling; dating ultrasounds; self-managed abortion; the medico-legal paradigm.