On Chronolegality: Reproducing Legal Time with Periodic Abortion Law

Abstract

The emergence of periodic abortion law, which makes abortion lawful for a measurable period of gestational time, is significant. Modern abortion law has moved towards decriminalization typically by making abortion lawful in general (e.g. as a result of legal rights to bodily sovereignty), or on particular exceptional grounds (e.g. when necessary to protect a pregnant person’s health). Periodic abortion law adds abstract time limits to the collection of criteria used to set legal standards for access to abortion. This paper argues that such use of time limits as criteria for lawfulness demands a reorientation of legal analysis, a reorientation which could be assisted with the further development of chronolegal concepts and methods.

Drawing from literatures which understand legal time to be material, multiple, and obscure, I turn to Ireland’s new periodic abortion law as a piece of positive law which has a collection of references to time. This law provided the statutory framework which enabled the legal transition from a historical constitutional change by referendum to the operation of an everyday abortion service, and contributed to social transition towards reproductive justice. By reading the statutory references to embedded time in light of each other, I develop an account of chronolegality as a concept of time which is reproduced in and through positive law in three ways.

First chronolegalities count time for legal purposes with a range of lively materials, including but not limited to clocks. Second chronolegal analysis enables identification of the norms of timeliness and punctuality that are generated by law, including earliness/lateness, reparation, speculation and crisis. Third chronolegalities anticipate felt responses to law’s temporal movement, including routine relief, anxious acceleration, harmful delays, and future hopefulness/hopelessness. In this way, chronolegal analysis provides a method for future analysis of abortion law as the regulation of reproductive labour, generating distinctions between good timely and bad untimely reproducers, and managing the conditions of gestational time. Working with chronolegalities holds open the possibility of intervening into the legal administration of time and reproducing law otherwise.

Keywords: Time and temporality, Abortion Law, Reproductive Justice, Legal concepts and methods