Reproducing Timely Subjects With Abortion Law: Calendaring, Punctuating, Anticipating

Abstract

Periodic abortion law materialises women and pregnant people as timely reproductive subjects, as those who may make themselves free of gestational labour, if they keep to time. Taking a feminist social reproduction perspective, which criticises capitalist exploitation of care labour time, I show how abortion law brings a planned and timely reproductive subject into being at the individual level, while differentiating and stratifying gestational labourers. The paper identifies three moves – calendaring, punctuating, anticipating - in the legal reproduction of time, moves that show us how abortion law regulates unwaged labour time. The 2018 transition to lawful abortion in Ireland worked by calendaring pregnancy into abstracted periods where abortion is either generally lawful (before 12 weeks) or exceptionally lawful on grounds such as risk to health (after 12 weeks).

Secondly this legal transition operated by punctuating gestational labour with expectations of timeliness as earliness, repair, speculation or crisis. And thirdly, this process of legal reproduction used deadlines and waiting periods to anticipate the denial of relief to abortion-seekers. By witnessing how these legal moves need material reproductive processes to progress, including those named by civil society actors during legal struggle, I theorise calendaring, punctuating and anticipating as different but related conceptual dimensions of the legal reproduction of unwaged gestational labour time, dimensions which may be reproduced otherwise.

Keywords: Time and temporality, abortion law, social reproduction, feminism, gestational labour