Unbearable time: Gender, power, and temporal governance in abortion policy and practice

In this article, I argue that state regulation of time in abortion policy, as well as its intended and unintended effects in practice, is a crucial site through which to understand the vexed relationships among time, gender, and state power. Anthropologists working in various global sites have demonstrated how state control over when abortion care can legally be provided operates as a form of reproductive governance that shapes if, when, and how pregnant people are able to access abortion care. Medically unjustified policies that regulate access to abortion care on the basis of time are stark examples of injurious forms of temporal governance —state mobilization of temporal strategies of control that result in harm, suffering, and even death. Anthropological attention to temporal governance contributes to public understanding of abortion by showing how policies of curtailing time and seizing time are employed as instruments of gendered constraint that produce deeply uneven possibilities for reproductive future‐making.