Abortion: Lessons from 1974 | Adriana Zaharijevic

The talk begins with an assumption that “the production of goods and services and the production of life are part of one integrated process” (Luxton 2006). If a refusal to produce goods and services can be compared to striking, to antiproductivism and antiwork (Weeks 2011), then abortion can be seen as a strike against biological production of life, or a wilful halt to its reproduction. Bryson (2023) argues that pregnancy is a gestational labour, while abortion appears as a response to it alienating forms and is thus a site of labour struggle. Moreover, it may be seen as an act of refusal of forced labour, a disengagement from the imposed reproduction of human capital. As persuasive as these claims are, I find them quite alienating and individuating at the same time. Our embodied lives are reduced to sites of struggle and, given the menacing attacks on the right to abortion, especially exemplified by Dobbs, perhaps this is not surprising.

I will venture to claim that this is because we tend to understand reproduction of life through a specific lens, that is often taken to be the only lens we have at our disposal. This lens is shaped by the 1974 Roe v Wade landmark decision, rooted in a peculiar reading of pregnant person’s right to privacy. The wording of Dobbs in 2022 has it that right to abortion was not ‘deeply rooted in this Nation’s history or tradition’. The liberal notion of privacy and the contemporary conservative invocation of history and tradition are, however, not the only contexts in which the debate on abortion may or indeed did appear. I will propose we take a look at another context – that of the socialist Yugoslavia where the right to abortion became a constitutional right in 1974. On a background of labour conceptualized differently, the terms of reproduction of social life – and a fortiori, of a biological life – were also understood differently. The main assumption was that human beings cannot realize their rights as isolated, private individuals, but only socially, through the transformation of the conditions they live in. From there it followed that the issues of biological reproduction could not be treated as belonging to the private sphere of individuals, separated from other social relations. The right to abortion appeared in the Constitution as the ‘right of man’, or a human right – understood as a larger social issue, concerning women, but never only them. It was articulated as well as a duty to respect humane interpersonal relations and a right of a child to be born wanted.

This turn to the ‘East’ and to the time when socialist experiments were still part of social reality, of the conceptualizations of social bonds, articulated as rights and duties, may provide us with an important and easily forgotten piece of recent history. A history that can be used not only to put into question sharp divisions between the South and the North, but also to help us reimagine the very terms of social reproduction. 

Speaker Bio

Adriana Zaharijević is a Principal Research Fellow at the University of Belgrade, Institute for Philosophy and Social Theory. Her work combines political philosophy, gender studies and social history. She authored four books, the latest being Judith Butler and Politics (Edinburgh University Press, 2023), and has published in Signs, Philosophy and Social Criticism, European Women's Studies Journal, East European Politics and Societies: and Cultures, Redescriptions and Women's Studies International Forum. Her texts were translated into Albanian, Bulgarian, German, Hungarian, Italian, Macedonian, Portuguese, Slovenian, Turkish and Ukrainian, and she herself has translated philosophy and feminist theory into Serbian. Zaharijević is also the proud holder of the Emma Goldman Snowball Award.  

Publications

Judith Butler and Politics by Adriana Zaharijević (2023)

Violence and Reflexivity: The Place of Critique in the Reality of Domination by Adriana Zaharijević (2022)

Bodies That Still Matter: Resonances of the Work of Judith Butler by Adriana Zaharijević (2021)

Book The Life of Bodies. Political Philosophy of Judith Butler by Adriana Zaharijević (2020)