Final Paper: Abortion and its Geography

Aadiba Tahseen

Department of Geography, Simon Fraser University

GEOG 241: People, Place, Society

Dr. Paul Kingsbury

December 6, 2022
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In a patriarchal world, we find ourselves with a shortage of feminism, and moreover, a

prejudice against the idea of feminism itself. Feminism is the promoting of women’s rights in

terms of equality amongst both sexes. The feminist idea and the feminine body have both been

sexualized for decades and women have been seen as objects of men’s desires or a resource for

producing off springs. On the other hand, men and the male patriarch of society have always

overseen everything including the rights of women and their bodies. When talking about bodies,

we specifically do not mean the physical body of a person but a pleasurable organ that lets

people experience joy and pain. The body is also a means of experiencing the spaces around it

and within in the form of mental health, physical wellbeing, and abstract feelings inside the

mind. To have power over such a thing would mean to completely give up one's identity and

free-will and submit to the patriarch because they know best. However, that is not true. To

understand female anatomy in its fullest, you need to have the body of a woman, which is not

possible whilst being a man. The patriarch should not have so much power over what a woman

chooses to do with her own body, including her right to a safe abortion. In this paper, I will be

backing up the newspaper article with three peer reviewed journal articles on abortion laws and

geography of abortion and women’s bodies in three separate places. Them being the UK, USA,

and Canada.

Abortion is termed as the deliberate termination of a fetus resulting in the death of the

embryo within the first 12 weeks of pregnancy (Merriam-Webster's Collegiate Dictionary, 2022).

In this paper, we look at a news story from 2022 headlined: “Liberals urged to fulfill promise to

cease funding to anti-abortion groups, crisis pregnancy centers” from The Globe and Mail. The

article refers to how the liberal party strongly urges the Canadian government to cease the

charity status of anti-abortion groups that corrupt people’s concepts of abortion and threaten the
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health of women across the country for safe abortions. Crisis pregnancy centers are more

formally known as pregnancy resource centers that provide free resources for mothers and those

who need supplies for their infants and children. These centers are “pro-life” and are run by anti-

abortion groups. They mostly take advantage of women who are unable to provide resources for

their infants by themselves, women who are on the lower income scale of society, and younger

teens who fall into accidental pregnancies and do not get support from their parents (Weeks,

2022). These centers pose as legal health services and propagandize anti-abortion ideas into the

minds of women and young teens to stop them from getting abortions with misleading details.

Therefore, the centers pose a threat and create fear. This is dangerous for women who are at

health risk because of their fetuses and further detrimental health effects could come up—death

being the worst-case scenario. The main point of the article is to urge the government and the

Prime Minister of Canada, Justin Trudeau, to seize charity status of these centers and stop

funding them as they are not professional health service providers because they spread false

information that puts people's health at risk and forces them to choose giving birth over their

own health. As social geographies point out the relations between people and places, this article

shows the relationship of a government towards the society and how they fail to keep their

citizens safe from misinformation that are life-threatening.

Taking a further look into Canadas abortion policies, the article by Sethna & Doull

(2013) mentions how abortion was legalized in 1969 and since then Canada has been one of the

few countries that does not have a federal law to regulate abortion. It is deemed medically

necessary but the term itself is vague and often will fall under the Canada Health Act. The

Canada Health Act regulates under five principles of being accessible, portable, universal,

comprehensive, and publicly administered nationwide (Sethna & Doull, 2013). However, it does
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not follow through when it specifically comes to abortion for women as most often times free

standing abortion clinics are not abundant even in Canada and leave out easy access for

populations from rural areas. It is a service accessible mostly to urban settlers and thus causes an

unequal distribution amongst society. When talking about urban areas in Canadian territories,

these populations are most often people from lower income backgrounds immigrants from other

countries. Rural areas are often associated with problems, such as underemployment, lower

incomes, lack of work and even connects to less progressed thinking (made less progress in

thinking than normal) in some areas (Kingsbury, 2022, Lecture 9). In the journal article, there is

also proof of how society marginalizes urban areas and keeps these people from developing and

acquiring the necessary resources they require for their health. The article states that the further a

woman has to travel to an abortion clinic, the chances of her actually getting an abortion reduces,

and this marginalized group is therefore seen as the younger and more underprivileged youth

(Sethna & Doull, 2013). As such, there is a recurring theme of how people who are vulnerable

and susceptible to being taken advantage of are always in the worst position and have to sacrifice

their health as they are not given much importance by their own governments. If there were more

accessible rural outreach areas out there, such as more availability to free standing abortion

clinics, the health and wellbeing for this group of people would not be as endangered. In terms of

feminist geography, Del Casino’s article, “Social Geography: A Critical Introduction,” questions

the spatial organization of gendered roles. The article states that clinics centralized within cities

are difficult to access by women from rural areas and thus restricts urban settlers from access to a

service that they urgently need. Much like the liberals in the news article, the authors also urge

the government to provide safe and legal healthcare support so that people who want an abortion

or need an abortion can do so without being judged or forced out of it.

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The rise of anti-abortion groups is not a sudden phenomenon. The idea of abortion being

taboo has been around for hundreds of years and stems mostly from religious beliefs. The pre-

dominancy of crisis pregnancy centers and anti-abortion groups being affiliated with Christian

Churches (Weeks, 2022) is also not a coincidence. This is one of the main aspects in the news

article, and this mindset is what causes harm and takes advantage of vulnerable women because

their moral values tell them so. They believe that they are doing good by “guiding” these women

out of abortion in the name of science. However, there is nothing scientifical about it, rather it is

more fictitious and filled with biases. In the study for medication abortion in the USA, Calkin

(2021) mentions how moral values of said anti-abortion activists create obstacles to make

abortion pills more accessible. With the help of medical abortion pills, there would be more

accessibility to abortions, and women from other rural regions would not need to travel as far to

get one. However, since this goes against the ideals of anti-abortion groups, they are restricted

even more. Therefore, it can be said that it is not only the failure of a governing body to regulate

abortions properly in an unbiased matter, but also the presence and support of anti-abortion

groups that make accessing abortion clinics or even methods such a difficult task for many

women.

Feminist geography advocates for the rights of women, including their rights to their own

bodies but in a patriarchal society that is often hard to achieve as the “male gaze” only sees the

female body as a sexed body or the object of desire and sexual pleasure (Kingsbury, 2022,

Lecture 2). But even then, the female body is only sexualized at times when it is convenient.

When viewed at a breastfeeding standpoint or in this paper’s topic, abortion, it deems well for

governing bodies as well as society to look down upon such practices. This is a harmful notion

that impacts only the women who are at the receiving end of such judgment as it not only causes
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mental distress but physical constraints as well. In Calkin’s (2021) journal article, the author’s

main argument is that those against abortion want to regulate clinics out of existence and as a

conclusion legislate smaller laws against it until there are not as many accessible abortion clinics

in the region. There are clear similarities between the article and Calkin’s paper on how anti-

abortion activists pose the biggest threat to safe accessible abortion procedures both in Canada

and the USA and that governments are responsible for allowing better funding for women’s

health. In both cases, the government fails to protect its population from stigmatized claims and

endangers their lives as well as strips them of their own rights.

Calkin’s (2019) earlier paper, “Towards a political geography of abortion,” addresses

how the recent take in modern society aims to further deplete access to abortion and how

geopolitics plays a hand in further manipulating this. The journal states that geopolitics is the

main cause of abortion pills being rarely recognized by communities as a safe alternative to

abortion clinics since there are state laws that regulate abortion. The introduction of abortions

pills, however, causes political unsettlement because it also has to be regulated. The paper refers

to a solution of both what the newspaper article addresses as well as abortion geographies

worldwide. It calls for transparency for laws related to abortion regulation amongst geographics

in different states as they have different views and responses towards abortion so that it is known

whether the abortion would be criminalized or liberated within that state (Calkin, 2019).

Furthermore, the paper encourages research into the legal reforms of abortion geographies and

politics as the problem roots from restrictive laws that force women into taking abortion pills

rather than going to a clinic. The goal is to decriminalize abortion completely so women do not

feel compelled to seek help at home via medication rather than getting professional medical care.
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The geography and politics surrounding abortion stem from a stigma against feminism

and the female body which has been constant throughout the course of history. It has been an

obstacle that has slowed down the development of feminist theory and hindered the rights of

women all over the world. Abortion and the right to a professional abortion is one of many

services that women have been denied due to the patriarch controlling federal laws for women’s

body and these laws often are birthed from moral ideologies. Whether it is people in Canada

urging the prime minister to revoke charity status to crisis pregnancy centers, or people in the

USA asking for the right to abortion in general, geopolitics of abortion and feminism has caused

some movement in the world for the rights of women. It has motivated others to stand up for

what is right and take direct action towards the governing bodies to act upon the heresy of anti-

abortion groups. Although women's rights have come a long way and women are more free in

this age than before, this motivation for fighting for women's rights cannot stop here. The fight

must continue in order for equality to be reached where both sides are at the same level of human

rights and opportunities so that humanity itself can be preserved in a safe and meaningful way.
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References:

“Abortion” Merriam-Webster.com. (2022). https://www.merriam-webster.com. Retrieved

December 5, 2022.

Calkin, S. (2019). Towards a political geography of abortion. Political Geography, 69, 22–29.

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.polgeo.2018.11.006

Calkin, S. (2021). Legal geographies of medication abortion in the USA. Transactions of the

Institute of British Geographers, 47(2), 378–392. https://doi.org/10.1111/tran.12506

Del Casino, Vincent J., Jr. (2009). Social Geography: A Critical Introduction. Oxford: Wiley-

Blackwell.

Kingsbury, D. P. (2022). Rural areas. GEOG241 Lecture 2: Bodies. Burnaby; Simon Fraser

University.

Kingsbury, D. P. (2022). Rural areas. GEOG241 Lecture 9: Rural Areas. Burnaby; Simon

Fraser University.

Sethna, C., & Doull, M. (2013). Spatial disparities and travel to freestanding abortion clinics in

Canada. Women's Studies International Forum, 38, 52–62.

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.wsif.2013.02.001

Weeks, C. (2022, July 11). Liberals urged to fulfill promise to cease funding to anti-abortion

groups, crisis pregnancy centers. The Globe and Mail. Retrieved November 30, 2022,

from https://www.theglobeandmail.com/canada/article-canada-crisis-pregnancy-centres-

charitable-status