Professor of Cultural and Social Anthropology at the University of Lausanne, Switzerland, and Senior Researcher at the Chr. Michelsen Institute, Bergen, Norway.
Midwife at the University Hospital Monji Slim, La Marsa, Tunisia.
Health Hum Rights. 2019 Dec;21(2):69-78.
In this article, we explore the effects that Tunisia's post-revolutionary democratization process has had on the right to abortion, drawing on ethnographic material, interviews, and medical files that we collected between 2013 and 2017, as well as the professional experience of one of us. We show that despite the existence of a relatively liberal abortion law for more than 40 years, women in Tunisia have trouble getting abortion care for economic and organizational but also ideological and political reasons. The existence of the abortion law constitutes but one factor among many others that determine women's ability to access abortion services; medical practices and women's abortion itineraries are caught up within complex arrangements that entail multiple socioeconomic and cultural factors, political transformations, the variability of rules in medical and administrative institutions, and contradictory interpretations of the legal apparatus. Examining the abortion itineraries of seven women we met in a large hospital in Tunis, we argue that these abortion itineraries shed light on the ordinary constraints experienced by poor Tunisian women who cannot afford to turn to the private sector. We maintain that attitudes toward the right to abortion in post-revolutionary Tunisia are problematic and that the democratization of local society has brought about unexpected consequences that do not extend but rather reduce women's rights in the domain of sexual and reproductive health.
在本文中，我们探讨了突尼斯革命后的民主化进程对堕胎权的影响，所依据的材料包括我们在 2013 年至 2017 年期间收集的民族志材料、访谈和医疗档案，以及我们其中一位成员的专业经验。我们表明，尽管存在相对自由的堕胎法已有 40 多年，但突尼斯妇女由于经济和组织原因，也由于意识形态和政治原因，难以获得堕胎护理。堕胎法的存在只是决定妇女获得堕胎服务能力的众多因素之一；医疗实践和妇女的堕胎行程都受到复杂安排的影响，这些安排涉及多个社会经济和文化因素、政治变革、医疗和行政机构规则的可变性以及对法律机构的矛盾解释。通过研究我们在突尼斯一家大医院遇到的 7 名妇女的堕胎行程，我们认为这些堕胎行程揭示了贫穷的突尼斯妇女在无法负担私营部门的情况下所经历的普通限制。我们认为，突尼斯革命后对堕胎权的态度存在问题，地方社会的民主化带来了意想不到的后果，不仅没有扩大反而减少了妇女在性健康和生殖健康领域的权利。
