Faculty In the Media: On Expanded Criminal Punishment for Abortion Seekers, and How to Do STS as a Feminist
In London Review of Books’ recent symposium on the overturning of Roe v. Wade, “Prejudice Rules,” Sophie Lewis zeroes in on the pernicious and monetizable effects of expanded criminal punishment for abortion seekers. The ostensibly life-affirming aim, she notes, of putting an end to abortion is hardly credulous from the historical point of view—“You can’t stop a practice that is as old as humanity”—and even less so, when one figures in the money that is sure to be made from from arresting, charging, and incarcerating those who do not wish to “manufacture a foetus against their will” and those who will assist them in avoiding this. “Ultimately,” Lewis argues, “cops and courts are what gestators and their allies have to fear, not illegal abortions (which are now overwhelmingly safe).”
And Danya Glabau sits down for a brief but expansive discussion with Nicholas McCay of the YouTube channel Eclectic Spacewalk, as part of their interview series STS Shorts. They talk about everything from Glabau’s new book Food Allergy Advocacy: Parenting and the Politics of Care to how social positioning affects people’s experiences with scientific knowledge and practice, illness activism as a form of social reproduction, teaching Donna Haraway, the historical contingency of our biological categories, living with technoscientific infrastructures, and how to do STS as a feminist.