In recent years, new forms of legal mobilization have altered the moral and political frameworks of policy-making, healthcare provision, and feminist advocacy for safe abortion across the Americas. While politicians in the United States have strategically invoked a discourse of 'health' to limit access to care, the right to health in Latin America has gained currency in struggles for reproductive justice and gender equality. This event situates these contemporary debates about abortion as a legal and public health issue within a broader set of concerns about the government of life and death, taking into consideration the multiple scales and sources of morality and normativity that shape visions of reproductive wellbeing in the Americas. Conference speakers include healthcare practitioners, legal scholars, feminist theorists, social scientists, and activists.

Sharing critical perspectives across different geographic and disciplinary fields,we will engage the following questions: How are frameworks of reproductive health entangled with carceral imaginaries of punishment and control? How do measurements of maternal risk and mortality use 'old' and 'new' discriminatory logics? How do such metrics generate competing visions of what counts as a reproductive future? In what ways do reproductive rights policies and practices contribute to, or resist the inequalities produced by neoliberal models of government, under-resourced healthcare systems and standing moral economies of gender and sexuality? What forms of ethical and political action are possible within conflicting regimes of legality, rights and criminalization?
 

Full program here.