Freeman Cordelia
Department of Geography, University of Exeter, Exeter, UK.
Mobilities. 2020;15(6):896-910. doi: 10.1080/17450101.2020.1803588. Epub 2020 Aug 6.
Scholarship on abortion travel has examined the places women travel between and why such journeys are necessary. However, there has been scant attention paid to the journeys themselves and these journeys are undertaken. This paper uses William Walters' notion of 'viapolitics' to better attend to people travel by focussing on the role of vehicles in abortion politics. This takes three parts: an exploration of the emotional and embodied journeys that women have to take to access abortions; the role of the vehicle as a site of political activism around abortion rights; and the transportation of abortion medication. Viapolitics has to date only been used within migration politics but as this paper shows, it has utility beyond this field to interrogate abortion travels and highlight the role of vehicles in abortion access as well as to explore how abortion transport can be emancipatory for women. This paper furthers viapolitics by arguing that we need to consider the journeys of 'things' and not just people. In the case of abortion access, it is the transportation of abortion medication rather than the travel of women that is the most socially just solution to discriminatory laws and extra-legal barriers.
关于堕胎旅行的学术研究考察了女性往来的地点以及此类旅程为何必要。然而，对于旅程本身以及这些旅程是如何进行的却鲜有关注。本文运用威廉·沃尔特斯的“交通政治”概念，通过关注交通工具在堕胎政治中的作用，来更好地关注人们的出行。这包括三个部分：探究女性为获取堕胎服务而必须经历的情感和身体旅程；交通工具作为围绕堕胎权利的政治激进主义场所的作用；以及堕胎药物的运输。迄今为止，“交通政治”仅在移民政治中使用，但正如本文所示，它在该领域之外也有用途，可用于审视堕胎旅行，凸显交通工具在堕胎服务获取中的作用，并探讨堕胎运输如何能使女性获得解放。本文通过主张我们需要考虑“物品”的旅程而非仅仅是人的旅程，进一步拓展了“交通政治”。就堕胎服务获取而言，堕胎药物的运输而非女性的旅行，才是应对歧视性法律和法外障碍的最具社会正义性的解决方案。
